I was experiencing a similar problem under gdm. When I start xmonad through gdm. My .xsession file was ignored and I was unable to start many of the programs that I wanted to start.
However I have found a solution, which is to just rename .xsession to .xsessionrc Once I made this change gdm is now loading the items in my .xsessionrc file upon starting xmonad. So it would be good to try this with kdm and see if you get the same results there. Cheers, Jeff -- Jeff Richards (250) 483-4318 http://www.jrichards.ca
