kde programs crashing in gnome

I recommend you enable Apport (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport#How%20to%20enable%20apport), install relevant debug symbols if possible (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and note that -dbg packages *should* be available for your PPA-provided KDE4 application and library packages, but -dbgsym packages probably won't be), read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs carefully, then produce one of the crashes. Apport will come up to help you report it--let it submit the information to Launchpad and bring you to a page where you can fill out a bug report.

This bug report serves three purposes:

(1) The process of *initially* reporting the bug may help you find the answer to your problem. As you'll read on the Reporting Bugs page, you can search to see if your bug has been reported by filing a bug yourself...but what's more likely to turn something up, in this case, is that when you submit a bug report, an automatic search is conducted to reveal bugs that look similar. One of them might be your bug. Furthermore, if you don't find a bug report that you think is for the same bug you're experiencing, then even *after* you report the bug, you bug could be marked as a duplicate of an existing bug (either automatically, for example by the "Apport retracing service" bot, or manually, by Ubuntu bug triagers or other contributors on Launchpad).

(2) Once you have a bug report with information automatically submitted by Apport, that information (along with your description, which is also very important) can be analyzed to help figure out your problem. I might even be able to look at it and propose a solution or workaround to the problem. When you report a crash with Apport, your bug report is automatically given Private visibility. This is because your bug report contains data from the running program, which could contain confidential or otherwise sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers. If you're sure you haven't entered or accessed such information with the program against which you're reporting the bug, then it's *probably* safe for you to mark the bug Public even before it goes through the process of having potentially sensitive information removed. As a middle ground, you could just subscribe me to the bug (of course, you have no strong reason to trust me anymore than you do anyone else on Launchpad). You should never mark someone else's private bug as public unless you are certain that it's OK (and there is no attached CoreDump.gz file), but for your own bugs, it's your choice. With that said, before you mark your bug public or even subscribe me to it, you should read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/HowToTriage carefully so you understand the potential risks, and keep in mind that, if you wait a while, data you submit in your bug will (usually) be transformed into a different form (less likely to contain sensitive information) and then your bug will (usually) get marked public on its own.

(3) Reporting bugs helps Ubuntu get better, which is a good thing for the community generally, but also for you specifically, because when a bug that specifically affects you is fixed, you are especially benefited.

So, with that in mind, I recommend you follow the above instructions and report this as a bug. We can continue working on the problem even if you choose not to do that, but doing that is probably the best way to figure out what's going wrong the fastest. Assuming you choose to report this as a bug, you should make sure your bug report is as complete and self-contained as possible--while it is a good idea to link your newly created bug report to this question using the "Link existing bug" link near the top of this page, it should not be necessary for the Ubuntu developers to refer to this question page in order to fully understand and appreciate your bug.