Kubuntu 7.10 Japanese environment disappointment

Just installed Kubuntu 7.10 on a 16GB Corsair I bought. A few problems came up in the boot after install, notably although I'd got it to manually install GRUB on my /dev/sdb drive (which GRUB c confusingly calls hd1), when Kubuntu booted it could not find the partition mapped as the root (hd1,0).. this it turns out is because the numbering changes depending on what was booted.. and as I selected USB boot from BIOS menu.. my /dev/sdb translated into being hd0. I change the root line in GRUB's edit mode to be hd(0,1) and it successfully booted though!

When I logged in, I noticed that although I had done a Japanese install (completely translated as Japanese during the install etc too), KDE was still in US English, and Japanese input did not even work! (Shift+Space is the usual combo to change into Japanese input). Alas, I've not figured out what is wrong with the install, and when I tried to get help online with Konversation that actually crashed:

#6 0xb71f09a3 in QGArray::duplicate () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#7 0xb6e28a33 in QMemArray::duplicate () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#8 0xb6e28a70 in QCString::operator= () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#9 0xb72070ea in QLocalePrivate::systemLocaleName ()
from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#10 0xb72071a2 in QLocale::system () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3

the rest of the back-trace was missing.. as Ubuntu still doesn't ship or automatically download symbols when it gets crashes..

Performance is a bit sluggish off this USBstick unfortunately, so I'm going to give try a differnet approach of just having the /boot on the USB stick, and then use an external drive for /, /home and swap!!