Adding the KDE desktop on top of Gnome works but not as well as a
native KDE installation. May be as well just getting the KDE version
and doing a clean install with that before getting too far into the
setting up process.

Get Kubuntu. If you get KDE then you lose the themes and get more packages
than you may want. Kubuntu is KDE that is tailored for Ubuntu.

I did go ahead and create a Kubuntu 11.10
Live "CD" by downloading it to my computer, burning it to a DVD (since
it was 733 MB and my CDs were only rated for 700MB).

All seemed to be fine, but when I installed Kubuntu to a separate
partition on my hard drive (which I wanted to share with Windows 7 and
Ubuntu 11.10 Unity), the Grub did not create a selection for Kubuntu
11.10. It left Windows and Ubuntu Unity intact, but got confused
somehow and did not create the selection to boot into Kubuntu. (Maybe
because it's only looking at the kernel number or something?)

Checking the partitions through GParted, everything is there. So, since
I do not know how to modify Grub, I might just have to delete all the
Linux partitions for both Ubuntus and start again with my Kubuntu fresh
install. No gain without pain, it seems.