kde-base/kdebase-startkde-3.5.4 's ebuild depends on "< virtual/x-11-7", so if I have X.org 7 it tries to downgrade it. Changing to "virtual/x11" works fine for me.
not devrel, reassigning to kde team.
Either that doesn't work properly or i am too stupid, sorry for the bugspam.
This is an OR dependency and < virtual/x-11-7 as the second half of it is correct. I can't reproduce your problem. Might there be a problem with local masking of distinct split xorg packages? Which Portage version are you using?
Please try and reproduce with kdebase-startkde-3.5.5, and if you can, post the output of 'grep -i kde -R /etc/portage'