So, this solution worked for me…for the most part. The kdeinit5 failed. Wouldn’t run at all. I had to use the nmcli command to first connect to wifi before I could issue the suggested commands, which isn’t the easiest thing to do if you’re new. Also, the IgnorePkg line failed and I could not get it to work. Invalid permissions I believe was the error. That said, I was able to boot to my desktop and manually choose to not upgrade kio. So I guess my question is, do I just have to manually monitor to see when a new version is available and hope it works? Thanks
EDIT
This solution worked for me:
pacman -S kcoreaddons kdbusaddons kwindowsystem kcodecs kconfig kirigami2 kquickimageeditor knotifications ki18n
as suggested here:
(KDE could not find theme after update)
It would appear that NeoChat was the culprit in my case as well. Even though I’d removed it, it’s git pulls had remained and caused problems.