JUST THE ANSWER I WAS LOOKING FOR!!!
I have an Asus P2B, 400 Mhz PII, 256mb RAM, available for me to load ... whatever. The video board is a Matrox Millenium G200, and often is a problem for other OS'es to properly identify.
Imagine my glee when Kubuntu 7.04 correctly put everything together to provide me an absolutely wonderful stable desktop. FreeBSD 6.2, Solaris 10 and Fedora 6 all failed identically in this area. HUGE KUDOS to all of you Kubuntu install developers!!!
So the first thing I did was customize my desktop, a VERY large picture of the US Air Force Thunderbirds in a fly by formation.
Next boot -- a KDesktop error message with "The process for the file protocol died unexpectedly." After a bit of googling, I read your message. I changed the desktop image to "Default Blue" and rebooted. The error message is gone.
Thanks bobosh and KDE-Forums!
RaneFan