Caveat: This worked for me.  It might melt down tomorrow, but today I'm
a happy camper.  I've distilled what seems to be a good informative
document ( http://www.athame.co.uk/kde-redhat.html ) into about a dozen
commands.

All I can guarantee is that it worked once.  I was willing to
potentially do a reinstall as the price of lazyness.  You'll need decent
bandwidth or lots of patience for the download portions.  Without
further ado, from runlevel 3 (X turned off) :

$ mkdir second
$ cd second
$ ncftpget ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2/RedHat/7.x/i386/*.rpm
$ ncftpget
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2/RedHat/7.x/noarch/kdoc-2.2-1.noarch.rpm
( I don't need to support other languages.  If you do, grab 'em from
noarch)
$ mkdir first
$ cd first
$ ncftpget
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2/RedHat/7.x/non-kde/i386/*.rpm
$ su -
$ cd /home/someuser/second/first
$ rpm -qva > just-in-case.txt  (pretend it wouldn't be *that* bad to
undo this)
$ rpm -Uvh --nodeps *.rpm --force
// watch the pretty warnings drift by...
$ cd ..
$ rpm -Uvh --nodeps *.rpm --force
// enjoy some more warnings
$ startx

Steve