Maybe Admiral LSD will drop in here soon and help you with the Gentoo questions. As far a kdm, it is a login manager. There are three that I know of. xdm, gdm and kdm. Configuring kdm will not automatically run kde unless you tell it to. You will see at the kdm screen,"sessions" which will show the desktop environments avaiable to you. You'll probably see in there Gnome and KDE and maybe others. Choose the one you want and sign in with your username and id. I hope this helps at least some...

Also sounds to me like you are booting to runlevel 3. After signing in your username and id, become root:
 
su [enter]
and password [enter]
 
type:
 
kdm [enter]
 
And it should come up.

Thanks for the help, I'll try them out Friday afternoon once I have Gentoo up agian. I started over with the intention of doing a stage 1, but I found that the bootstrap script needs an internet connection, which I don't have on Linux box. If you know how to copy the necessary files to my Gentoo partion, through my Suse partion, or if you know how to connect to the internet through a windows xp machine I would greatly appriciate the help with a stage 1. If not I'll go back to stage 3, which is still great. Thanks

I'm kind of in a similar situation. I downloaded stage 1 tarball and extracted it to it's own directory. I understand you can run Gentoo from within a directory of an existing distro but I'm not sure at this point how. I think I have to fiddle with /grub/grub.conf in some way, but this is causing anxiety. I'd really like to check out Gentoo, but the more I look at their website, the more confused I get!

If you want to start kdm on boot with Gentoo you first need to open up /etc/rc.conf and edit the DISPLAYMANAGER line to reflect your choice of kdm before adding the xdm service (this is a generic service, it'll start whatever you define in rc.conf, not just xdm) to the default runlevel using the rc-update command:
 

Code:

rc-update add xdm default

 
As for an internet connection through a Windows XP box, provided the XP box is the machine hosting the connection you can simply use XPs Internet Connection Sharing (activated in the property sheet for the internet connection concerned) to create a gateway the Gentoo box can use to download it's packages. Just enable ICS on the XP box and use the net-setup program on the Gentoo LiveCD (or if you're using a different distro, whatever tool it uses to set up network connections) to use the XP box as it's gateway. I do this myself and it works a treat.
 
And lastly, I really wouldn't know how to set XSESSION up as I don't use it, I use individual xinit scripts in /etc/X11/xinit instead as it's much easier to manage.

The XP box isn't hosting the connection, but connecting through a wireless network. I'm trying to use wired lan on both XP and Linux to share the connection. Since this has become about ICS on XP I thought the Windows Forum might would be a better place to continue this.