Plasma crash after Mageia 8 reinstall

[fmolina2b]

Dear all,
I recently reinstalled Mageia 8 with plasma desktop as default. Previously it was running OK but due to disk changes I reinstalled it from scratch, but untouching the /home partition. The install ran smoothly, but after restart plasma crashes just after start; this often happens when painting the desktop, sometimes just the background and taskbar (which I use at the top), sometimes also the icons. The it freezes, does not respond to mouse, even sometimes I cannot do Ctrl-Alt-FX to open another console.
IceWM and LXDE are installed and work OK. Im am currently using LXDE, but want to return to plasma. Apart from the obvious question (what to do?), I have more specific questions:
1. How to unistall/reinstall de whole kde environment? Just plasma-desktop does not solve the problem.
2. Could that be related to a settings issue? Would deleting the .kde and/or .kde4 folders be advisable?
3. I as user am member of several groups notably wheel, vboxusers and some others. After the install none of these were enabled, and the problem appeared. I think it does not matter, but just in case ...
If anybody can help, I will be grateful.
Mageia 8
Plasma 5.20.4

[fernando@localhost ~]$ uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 5.14.17-desktop-1.mga8 #1 SMP Sat Nov 6 14:51:14 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

AMD FX 8350 8-core, 16 GB ram, 1x 960 GB Kingston SSD, 2 x 1 TB WD blue HD.
Plasma 5.20.4

[sturmvogel]

Are you using X11 or Wayland?

Plasma settings are not only stored in the.kde folders. They are also found in several files in ~/.config
The easiest way would be to create a new user and look if the problem persists.

[fmolina2b]

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

[fmolina2b]

The easiest way would be to create a new user and look if the problem persists.

Hi, thank you for the suggestion but no, new user has the same problem. That seems to discard configuration issues.

[benmc]

what was your install media?

have you verified the image?
k3b for opticals will do this, isodumper for USB. some other USB burners do not as a rule.

if install was via netinstall, you may have had a mirror issue, but usually there would have been a complaint type popup notification during install, but the install can complete and reboot to a *working* desktop.

look into the install log and see if anything seems unusual.