Sometime Today, NM cobbled together some glyphs to say:
If I copy the .kde, .gaim and .mozilla directories to my new home folder when I change distros, will the preferences be read properly on the new distro if they have the same version of the apps.
You have to worry about file ownership. Make sure your uid and gid are the same on both distros. If you do that, then you can just mount the same home partition from both distros. I've done this with 3 distros in the past, sharing swap, /home, /tmp and /var/spool/mail, with 3 common users. You just need to keep /etc/passwd and /etc/group in sync.