TDE on Mepis Linux

Hi all, I have been following TDE development, howeverI don't like Ubuntu's "way of life" and Debian Squeese lacked some drivers I need, so I've been using Squeese based Mepis 11 for the last moths (Warren finaly put together a usable KDE 4.x desktop). With the release of TDE 3.5.13 I decided to look if I could install it on Mepis. I followed the instructions for Squeese and actually everything went smoothly, except that update-initramfs failed, so I had to run it again with -t -u The problem I'm trying to solve is this: after reboot, I was able to choose TDE as environment for my session. However, I get a "Could not start kdeinit. check your installation" message. When I click "OK", TDE seems to load correctly, but kicker crashes on me very often, some settings can't be done (e.g. I cant change the clock, clicking on "configure clock" crashes kicker). I don't seem to find the TDE settings, which I would expect to be linked to this error too. Where should I look to try and understand *what* prevents kdeinit to start? I'm not sure if this culd be a KDE 4 / TDE conflict. This is not a production install, so I can try almost anything. thanks for any suggestions, Thierry