Madhusudan Singh wrote:
> Hi
>
> Did a bunch of updates on my Debian Etch system. Among others, KDE was
> upgraded to 3.5. Now, when X starts up (tried both kdm and gdm), there is a
> strange kind of translucency present - the mouse cursor is invisible, and
> the text is visible, without the colors that distinguish a window from the
> background. Nothing is readable. I am posting this from a Knoppix live CD
> session.
>
> Logging into Gnome leads to one advantage - can at least see the terminal,
> though any ncurses dependent stuff leads to the same problems.
>
> Any idea about what is wrong, and how do I fix it from a text only
> runlevel ?
>
> Thanks.

Perhaps this is way overkill, but maybe;
dpkg-reconfigure kdm
or
dpkg-reconfigure gdm
use whichever one you like least, in case something goes really funky,
like lost files /settings

Wait for other advice