Need help troubleshooting

I'm working on bug report 892. Most of this work involves changing XDG categories (X-KDE-Whatever -> X-TDE-Whatever), which will help further distinguish Trinity from KDE3 and KDE4 and reduce potential conflicts. The work is going well but I have run into a challenge. When I rebuild tdelibs and tdebase to install desktop files to $PREFIX/share/applications/trinity rather than $PREFIX/share/applications/kde, a few things start breaking. Some keyboard shortcuts stop, but I can recover that by deleting the user's khotkeys config file and starting afresh. That problem might be related or not, or might just be cruft from its KDE3 days when I migrated profiles. The real problem is noticeable when I open Konqueror and select the Settings menu option. Most of the setting modules do not appear. The only modules that appear are the "native" ones: Behavior, Appearance, Previews & Meta-Data, and Performance. The associated desktop files built and installed to $PREFIX/share/applications/trinity just fine. I can solve the problem by creating a sym link from $PREFIX/share/applications/kde to $PREFIX/share/applications/trinity and restarting the session. I tried a new profile but that did not solve the problem either. Only the sym link, or building to $PREFIX/share/applications/kde, avoids the problem. I haven't tested with other packages because at this point I only need tdelibs and tdebase for testing. At this point I'm concluding that something in the code is hard-coded to look for $PREFIX/share/applications/kde. I can't find anything obvious or explicit. I've looked hard and am stumped. I would appreciate any help in this challenge. :) Thanks! Darrell