doubled/blurred icons and text in kde menus and panels

[ericrhenry]

After a recent emerge sync and update (I am now using KDE 4.8.5) my session after logging in now has all icons and text doubled or tripled, blurred and overlapped, so that the text is unreadable. This happens with all icons and task entries on the panel/taskbar as well as the "K" app-launcher and in all nested menus. There are no issues with display quality within Firefox or Thunderbird or kterm sessions, or I guess any display items under the traditional purview of the window manager. This suggested to me (not an expert) that the problem lies somewhere in the desktop/workspace management system. In scattershot fashion I re-emerged some of the plasma components, as well as krunner, with no improvement. Can anybody suggest what the problem might be, or how I might go about troubleshooting?

Thanks
Eric