System reinstall, kmail, kopete and other application preferences/settings

I deleted my root directory in an attempt to delete a file that was starting with the character "/". A crash of konqueror had left such impossible file in some subdirectory of /tmp. As root I played with some regular expresssions to delete it, but only managed to delete my root directory. Not completely (as the excessive disk activity made my soon realize my mistake), but sufficiently beyond repair. So I had to reinstall the system which took only 50 minutes from the DVD (selecting allmost all software packages) plus another 40 minutes for the online update via the ftp.funet.fi. Funnily funet.fi is not listed by YOU as a suse mirror although it is pretty up-to-date, less frequented than e.g. sunet.se and for me much faster than most other mirrors. I created also a new user account as I wanted to get rid of several badly configured preferences. From my old home directory I only copied the directories ~/Mail, ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/bookmarks.xml, ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete and ~/.kde/share/apps/kwallet, ~/.gnupg, ~/.wine and ~/.vmware. Only later I realized that some kde applications keep configuration settings in still another directory, namely ~/.kde/share/config. Kopete and Kmail only started to work properly using the old settings when I copied also the kopeterc and kmailrc files. Another inexplainable thing was the partitioning that I did during the reinstall. The installer suggested to install a completely new system onto my /home partition. So I had to manually configure the partitioning and as my /dev/hda7 is an encrypted partition I edited it by giving it the encrypt partition (C) flag. The partitioner asked for the password which I typed in (twice). Everthing went ok until I first tried to mount this encrypted partition. It didn't work. After some time I figured out what was the reason: the newly installed system assumed that "losetup -e twofish" (= the default twofish) is twofish160, but my old system assumed that the default twofish is twofish256. So I had to change twofish in /etc/cryptotab to twofish256. Another thing you might need to copy over from an old install is the license for VMware which is located in /usr/lib/vmware/licenses and root's ssh keys (for BackupPC) in /root/.ssh.