I just installed TDE 3.5.15 on a fresh wheezy box (T61p, kernel 3.*, nvidia drivers). Funny thing, anything worked, after I got rid of all KDE4 libs which caused a blue screen with cursor after login otherwise.
The only issue I did not find a reason for is that $HOME/.config/user-dirs.dirs gets overwritten with all folders set to $HOME:
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME"
So this causes TDE to assume the desktop folder is the useres home directory. I can change that dir to "$HOME/Desktop" and apply the immutable flag to the file to prevent it beeing overwritten at login - the fiole is overwritten at each login somewhere before TDE reads it.
Now my question is, what when why is this file written? It's a bit anoying when you stumble upon that problem :-)
Nik