So I was diddling around with my KDE settings under Ubuntu and got really jazzed when I could finally move the window control buttons over to the left where I’m used to them having used OS X since version 1.0 (can it really be eight years ago!?)

Maybe you could do it before but I had never noticed.

Things were going really well until one change caused it to fail to come back from the “Trying New Settings” step it goes through where it makes sure you can see and dismiss a dialog within to 10 seconds or reverts to just before your most recent change(s).

I couldn’t do anything in the VM so I rebooted it.

Long series of reboots short, a quick search found this: HowTo: Reset KDE to Previous Configuration State

Boot into a text mode terminal (the button’s at the bottom of the KDE boot screen) and delete the ~/.kde directory and everything under it with

# rm -rf ~/.kde

Restart and KDE will come back to life. Yay.