Hello again.  I found the answer to my own question by accident.  Since none 
of you responded, I'll assume you don't know the answer yourselves ;-) so 
here it is for future reference:

the K menu is defined in ~/.kde/share/applnk.  In Konquerer, you can hop 
there by selecting "Applications" from the Go menu, and then you can create 
and modify the necessary files *without* using the cumbersome menu editor.  
--Ben

On Monday 17 September 2001 10:36, I wrote:
> Hi, folks.  Yesterday I was reorganizing my K menu when the menu editor
> program crashed, and about half my program folders disappeared from both
> the menu and the editor (when I had restarted the program).  I looked all
> around in my .kde directory trying to find the file(s) responsible for the
> K menu but couldn't find them, so I wound up copying the entire .kde
> directory from another user account and starting over from scratch.  (sigh)
>  At least it was faster the second time.
>
> Unless I'm mistaken, the KDE configuration tools don't have traditional man
> pages, and their HTML help pages don't say anything about where their files
> are stored.  How would I go about finding this sort of thing out in the
> future, so that I don't have to replace files I don't want to?
>
> (Yes, I could have copied a file, logged out, logged in, copied another
> file, and so on, but I couldn't get excited about that idea.)  Thoughts?
>
> --Ben (running Yellow Dog Linux 2.0)
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