The fbcon is the Biggie!. But that is now some compiled into the kernel magic that I'm pretty much at a loss to deal with. I installed xf86-video-fbdev and the fbdev error is gone, but as others correctly said, that wasn't the problem.
fbcon is the framebuffer console,i.e. a module that provides a console over a framebuffer device (as opposed to the VGA console). It shouldn't be an issue for anything X related.
The only thing I am 100% certain of at this point is there is a problem somewhere because the box worked great up until I did the update on 10/8 and I haven't seen kde since...
I'm sure it's something simple that just needs to be fixed in the kernel or in one of the modules. But I am equally sure that it will take someone much smarter than I on the kernel or module at issue to do it :p
Does you KDE work if you try to log in as a new clean user? -- damjan