[ninjatux]

You made a mess. kde4 is a meta-port. Removing it does absolutely nothing with respect to actual kde4 components and dependencies. You needed to run make deinstall on each of it's dependencies and components instead of deleting /usr/local/kde4. Now, you have a bunch of stale ports entries in /var/db/pkg that should not be there and possibly KDE 4.1 files that were not installed in /usr/local/kde4.

With respect to portmaster, it does work. You should read the manual page because it literally spells out how to use portmaster. Did you miss the following line at the beginning of the manual page?

 portmaster [Common Flags] Multiple full names or paths from /usr/ports or
                /var/db/pkg, and/or multiple globs from /var/db/pkg
     portmaster [Common Flags] -p port directory in /usr/ports

If you specify a port with reference to /usr/ports then you need to use the -p flag. portmaster defaults to port names in /var/db/pkg as do most other maintenance programs.

You could have done one of the following:

portmaster -e -p x11/kde4

OR

portmaster -e kde4

Again, the kde4 in the last example assumes that the entry in /var/db/pkg is called kde4. To verify that, you could have done:

ls -l /var/db/pkg/kde*

OR

pkg_info -x kde4

I recommend that you manually remove each of the kde4-related packages via ports now and then run the following command to CAREFULLY remove any UNNECESSARY dependencies.

portmaster -s

Good luck!