Well I'm a KDE user, at least til the weekend when I once again reinstall Ubuntu. Yes one again Gnome went away, not sure why as I hadn't played with any settings, installed any software or done any updates during the previous session.
After trying repeatedly to fix the issue from bash, I remembered,on the point of dispair that I had previously installed the Kubuntu-Desktop, before giving up I thought I'd see if KDE still worked, it did, brlliant!
Beng a KDE user again after two years with Gnome has been an interesting experience there are many things to like about KDE, Kpackage to start with, this awesome package manage can handle installing both DEBs and RPMs in Ubuntu, simply and easily. Super Karamba is another cool KDE app, allowing the installation of various desktop applets I'm currently running the AeroClock applet(a cool tranparent clock) and the Techmon Lite system monitor, Another very impressive thing about KDE are the cool screen animations menus seem to slide out of some secret drawer, cartoon style balloons unfurl themselves before your eyes as you mouse over icon. Also deeply appreciated is the completeness of the Kmenu, every graphical app can be accessed frim there as well as many terminal apps, That said all is not wine and roses it is much slower then Gnome and this can get to be an issue when trying to run already slow apps like OpenOffice.org and I find myself switching to a simple windows manager to do more processor intensive things like gaming. Still all in all a good experience, I wouldn't choose KDE as a full time replacement for Gnome just yet but I can see why others choose to use it full time.