Penguinbait: Presume you're still tweaking things, but as an update to my efforts (insignifcant as they may be), I have noted that in installing the keyboard per your instructions to run /usr/local/bin/keyboard.sh, I get the following error message:

"Sorry - server Keyboard map doesn't contain either 2 or 4 KeySyms per Keycode - unsupported!"

However, the keyboard still appears, but I seemingly must type the command everytime I'm in the terminal for it to appear.

Also, even though I still have not experienced any system crash when I boot-up KDE, I am still unable to get past the point of installing the KDE panel, i.e., I still get the KDE Panel Crash Handler Screen.