Guys, not disagreeing with anything said but this has waved WAY off topic.  I have news.
I followed steps derived (loosly) from the article http://thelinuxrain.com/articles/tutorial-how-to-use-kwin-window-manager-with-xfce
and got it working.
I now have a selection on startup of fluxbox, the original look and feel (and FASTEST startup), or xfce with KWIN, or the full Plasma desktop.  I am sure this method is wasteful and heavy, it ate a lot of disk.  Full plasma is very slow to load.  XFCE with Kwin is slow, but faster than full plasma and EVERYTHING works as I want it.  I think this will be my default going forward, as it looks impressive and performs well.
I have cube animations, the hot-keys I like, window corners I defined, everything works the same under xfce and plasma. 
Because it spans different sessions, I may have to take some time with screenshots and some animation to show the result.

Thank you all for both in-form and private recommendations, comments, and subtle kicks to the brain!  It worked!    

Confirmed: all of the youtube video related that I have found depend upon the same basic mix of packages, and those packages are either unavailable under SID or have changed to conflict with each other. 

I am convinced it CAN be done, but also that it CANNOT be done by following any of these videos.   

IF anyone has additional advice, I will check back here later.  I will post an update if I find a way to make it work.

I am finding lots of videos, and I am sure they all work, IF you use the Ubuntu repositories.  So far I am finding that if they require only 12 pacakges, five of those are not in the SID repos and vsido cannot find them.  Hmmmm......

I really detest using video instead of a good black-and-white how-to, but in this case I will take your advice.  If that is the best information available, I will not reject it because of the format.
I will install xfce4 and kwin, and go search for the video. 

Rather glad you advised kwin, and I was leaning that way anyway.  I love compiz, but it does not seem to have much support these days.
If I get somethign worth seeing, I will capture a short and log a link here, along with some detail on ho-I-did-it.  (And, just perhaps, to a how-to document of my own creation.

Thank you all for every reply!! 

Greetings all,
I was wondering if anyone had a pointer to a HOW-TO document that would get that whole DESKTOP CUBE feature working on VSIDO.
It does not matter what flavor (compiz, KDE, or other) as long as it looks and works. 
I have absolutely NO REAL NEED for it: I just want to impress the pants off of my 'Windows Centric' co-workers.  A google search landed nothing but Ubuntu documents, that do not apply to any sane/other distribution.

(If there IS no such document, good advice is ALWAYS welcome!) 

Confirmed.  I was able to run an upgrade today without it wanting to uninstall all of xorg and all of my installed kernels. 


How do I mark this 'solved'?

Everything has been going fine for the last three months, when suddently, just today..
apt-get dist-upgrade wants to remove all of xorg and uninstall every kernel.  This would, obviously, render my laptop unbootable.

Does anyone know what is going on?  Are the Repos broken? 

Issue appeared resolved after several updates.  Not sure if it was grub or the kernel, but since it did not affect the otehr kernels I simply bypassed it.  Running 3.16 amd64 kernel now with different issues involving only apt-get.
I wish I knew what caused this, but since I can no longer recreate the problem, we can close the discussion.   

Within the last few days there was an update to the kernel image, and I stopped being able to reboot.
It looks as if the drive is not recognized, the error indicates that the UUID was not found.  Odd, since the UUID repoorted is correct, and works fine with all earlier kernels.  In fact it worked with earlier 3.14 kernels!

This is an old HP laptop, but I think that unlikley to be significant.  Not looking for cause or troubleshooting at this point, or I would post a small library of diagnotics.  Just wondering if anyone else has encountered this.  Have you?