greetings, good people . . .

i sought to upgrade from kubunto 10.04 LTS, atop which i had been running trinity's kde 3.5.13, and thought i had done so. i used the update manager. all was well. this was on december 21.

then this morning i saw that my adept notifier was absent, so i went to install adept-trinity. and there the trouble began. it blew up pretty much everything, uninstalled my carefully-crafted kde3 desktop, refused to remove ksmserver-kde3 because of a dkpg-divert error involving /usr/bin/plasma and /usr/bin/plasma.kde4 conflicting with a local divert to the same effect (i was able to nuke both of those and the install thereafter went uneventfully) and now my carefully crafted kde desktop is gone. also, kmail will not work, firefox will not close, and generally the whole thing is a mess.

i have backups of my old ./kde and ./kde3 directories. is there a way to apply them so as to get my desktop back?

thanks in advance for any instructions and advice you may be able to provide.

dep