I don't like all the default silver/blue bling of KDE4 either, so this is what I ended up with now. Even on my 7 year-old lappy it performs OK – probably, XFCE or LXDE would be faster, but stuff is still running at reasonable speeds for webbrowsing and text editing and the occasional photo editing job. Also, I don't know what Miekko tried doing, but I don't really have trouble with KDE forgetting my settings all the time.