Thanks a lot, jucato. I used Synaptic (I use it interchangeably with Adept -- no preference -- like them both) to reinstall the kde-guidance package and those modules work perfectly now. I think now that it actually had nothing to do with the recent updates thru ubuntu. Around the same time this all happened, I had just removed the "power manager" in favor of installing "kpowersave" as the power manager applet kept trying to shut my laptop down as it kept thinking the lid was closed when it wasn't. So I went to kpowersave, which, in my opinion, is slicker and better anyway. But power manager was tied into the kde-guidance package I discovered when looking to uninstall it as it is named "kde-guidance-powermanager". I still don't know why they are interconnected as they are dependent on one another but when i did the uninstall to the kde-guidance-powermanager package, something must have went awry with the settings of modules within the kde-guidance package. Reinstalling that package as you suggested got everything working perfectly again. And I can keep using kpowersave as my laptop's power manager of choice.
Thanks again. I doubt the solution would have ever dawned on me. It's nice that folks like you around the forums can recognize such things. I wouldn't have known at all that those four packages happen to all be installed together under kde-guidance.