I ran into a stubborn twist. On a couple of test machines I have both 3.5.10 and 3.5.13 installed. 3.5.10 is installed to /usr and 3.5.13 is installed to /opt/trinity. This kind of setup would be similar to having KDE4 installed too. That is, this problem will be seen in those environments too. I have /etc/profile.d scripts add /opt/trinity/bin to the beginning of the $PATH variable and startkde checks for that too. All is well until using kdesu. Kdesu acts like su rather than su -. Root therefore inherits the system default $PATH, which for root is quite limited and does not include /opt/trinity/bin. Nor are any /etc/profile.d scripts sourced because kdesu is not performing a simulated login like su -. Therefore /usr/bin is first in the system $PATH for root and/opt/trinity/bin is not in that search path at all. The 3.5.10 version of kate gets opened. The same thing will happen with KDE4. I can overcome the problem by typing the full path of the app and adjusting shortcuts accordingly. For example, kdesu /opt/trinity/bin/kate. Doable but inconvenient. Is there something obvious I am missing to get kdesu to inherit /opt/trinity/bin as the first directory in $PATH? Darrell