Right you are! It turns out that I had accidently reinstalled kdm 3.3 when I needed kdm 3.4 to run with kde 3.4. Thanks so much for pointing me in the right direction.
I purchase a "new" computer and moved my disk to it. I've been changing the kernel to support the different hardware including a ati 3d rage pro video adaptor. kernel is 2.6.11.7 kde is 3.4 xfree86 is 4.5.0 When /etc/init.d/kdm start executes, KDM crashes in KDMGREET with a sigsegv I can start a KDE session using the command startx from a shell prompt. Attached is kdm.log with lots of debug info.