How to restore KDE to work in Kubuntu 14.04?

Question

linux

I have a Kubuntu 14.04 VM image that I need right now. Six months ago it was still working great.
Now, after entering the password, the KDE startup splash screen appears and disappears. There is a black background and the mouse cursor.
I switched to tty1, cleared disk space and updated all packages with apt-get. But that didn't help - after restarting KDE, it still freezes at startup.
Intuition tells me to simply rearrange the graphical shell, but I already have it so conveniently configured that I would like to leave this step as a last resort.
Can someone tell me where to look at the startup logs (or vice versa, where to enable logging), in order to understand what the problem is and why KDE stops at startup?

Answer 1

Symptoms are similar to jambs with a user profile.
Try mv ~/.kde ~/.kde.old