Well this was painful.
I completely forgot to add threads to my use flags. As a result, when I built the last version of QT, it didn’t include the threading support. Unfortunately this significantly effects the performance of KDE. So I’m going back and rebuilding glibc, gcc, qt, and kdelibs & kdeartwork (as suggested from the forums).
The one application that this effect the most is KFS, which I use to synchronize my work directories as a backup.
Correction: I later found out that had more do to with the speicifc version of QT that was installed as opposed to the used of the threads use flag. I was able to reproduce the same performance issue with QTParted, but everything was OK once I was able to install the masked version of QT. Unfortunately KFS won’t compile against that version, so I need to figure out what I’m going to do there.