Retaining env vars that are set after login

[lorgoth]

Okay, for the longest time I have been trying to deal w/ several "Gentooisms", but I am finally sick and tried of dealing w/ them so I decided to see if the forums could help me out. Here is the problem...

I keep at least two full versions of KDE (stable and development) on my system. I boot up to a text console and login. Then I decide to run the devel or stable version by sourcing a shell script that changes my environment variables accordingly and finally I startx. When X comes up I expect my shells to have this same environment. This works w/ the other Linux distros I have used, but not in Gentoo. I have done a bit of reading and playing around. From what I can tell this is due to the env.d stuff that Gentoo uses. It seems that profile.env thinks it should overwrite the path and my other KDE variables instead of inheriting the path from the shell that launched X. This doesn't seem like a very nice thing to me. Does anyone know a quick and easy way to solve my little problem? I would prefer do something like have profile.env just append to my current path or check to see if the KDE variables are already set and if they are then not set them to something new. I know that I can write a simple shell script to do this, but is this functionality built into the env.d scripts in some way that I have failed to realize or have I just completely missed the boat on this issue?

Thanks in advance.