Problems with kwin

I've been running trinity since the ubuntu team tried to shove kde4 onto us. Through the various versions, and including most recently with a clean install off the trinity maverick cd, I have had the problem that when I log out of my desktop, kde does not save what programs I had open at the time (which should be restored when I log back in). The only solution I have found to this issue is to link to kwin in ~/.kde3/Autostart/ (now with 3.5.13 its in ~/.trinity/Autostart/). Also of note is that kwin is NOT found in 'ps' unless I do this. Now it is my understanding that if kwin is not running, I should be seeing a lack of desktop affects - noticeable things like window borders and such - however when my desktop starts up there are no apparent visual problems. Yet unless I start kwin in Autostart, when I log out of my desktop and back in again, I am always returned to a desktop with konsole and firefox opening up, but nothing else. Once kwin is added to Autostart, my desktop always opens up to whatever programs I had running when I logged out (including correct window and multi-desktop placement). My wife's system: maverick trinity with the standard updates applied. My system: maverick trinity installed, do-release-upgrade to natty, then pulled the apt sources to upgrade to trinity 3.5.13. Through none of these steps did kwin save my desktop on logout. What I would like to know is if there was an issue at some point along this path that kwin did not get added to the normal kde startup process, and if there is a more appropriate way that I should get it to run when a user logs in?