Trouble with Kde Menu edit and kde 3.5

Running Debian Unstable and KDE 3.5.1 so I do not expect everything to work
I used kiosktool before on a Debian stable with KDE 3. what ever that defaults 
to.
So now I tried with this and the menu edit does not stay edited.
If I make a profile
Edit the menus and then come back again all work is lost 
On a folder level I noticed this
/path/to/profiles/profile_name/ <--in this folder there are
share
etc
On the working machine and etc seems to have all the info on the kde menu side
in the etc is xdg/menus
I tried copying this layout to the new install but that did not help
Any thoughts?
Al
ps..thanks for this great tool