themes, window decorations, icons, etc

[icronk]

I've been using Linux for two years now and for most of that I've been using KDE for a DE/WM. I like to ckeck out the themes, icons, and window decorations on freshmeat and kde-look.org and try them. My problem is I can never get half the stuff I download to install or work properly if at all. I've looked at some guides they have on their site and freshmeat's and some others I found while googling but can't find any consistency to them. For some of them it's just a matter or configure, make, make install like usual but even if I can get it sucessfully installed that way, It doesn't show in the KDE control center nor can I find it on my system. SOme of the themes have a .ktheme file after extracting which is no problem to install but the majority do not. I'm using Knoppix 3.3 with KDE 3.2 if it makes any difference. I can never get the icon themes to work, there must be a dir wher I can dump the icons into in order for them to show up in control center. The styles and window decorations rarely work for me either, I can get them compiled and installed most of the time but never see them again. Some of the themes, styles, etc I downloaded have created dir's where downloaded them and after running through the installation that's all i can find is the dir from the installation which doesn't seem to contain anything I can add using control center. I'm sure I must be going about this all worng and it's really quite embarassing that I can't install themes on my system, so if anyone would be kind enough to point me in the right direction or give me some solid directions it would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,