Good call,
kcontrol is doing it's job, it looks like the problem
is in kate/kwrite not respecting what is in the user-dirs.dirs file:
23:28 valkyrie:~> cat .config/user-dirs.dirs
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR[$e]="/home/david/"
How about other apps? Kate and Kwrite share much in common.
Possibly temporarily rename katerc and kwriterc and try again. I have had some troubles
with both in my migrations from KDE3 to TDE. I think the files get corrupted. I
haven't spent much time narrowing which elements in the files are confusing the TDE
versions. I think the [$Version] group is one. Just delete the whole group section from
the rc file.
Also delete the [KFileDialog Settings] group section.
See what happens.
Darrell