I have read a number of different explanations and suggestions, some of them regarding an earlier, yet similar, tanglement between versions of qt-*.   I've tried a number of suggestions, and I have unmerged and remerged packages. 

I am now trying to individually merge packages with dependencies on  qt-*-4.5.2.  
 
I tried KDE 4.3.1, with some trepidation, and I have happily been running gnome, save a couple of nits, and I have run into qt issues in the past.  I would like to uninstall kde4 (like it, but not well enough to devote so many resources to it, and to have to upgrade frequently and painfully).  I would like to remove the KDE 4 installation, but keep the individual packages depending on kdelibs.  (K3b, etc.).  Would this have an impact on this issue?  This is off topic, but how to uninstall EXCEPT what I want, of KDE4?   Is this reasonable?

Thanks.  I hope to solve this soon,  but it's too early to know whether the help on this list was enough.  I changed USE flags, and the same messages appear:

!!! One or more updates have been skipped due to a dependency conflict:

x11-libs/qt-gui:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
    ~x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-webkit-4.5.2-r1', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-sql:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
    >=x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.0:4[mysql] required by ('installed', '/', 'app-office/akonadi-server-1.2.1', 'nomerge')

x11-libs/qt-core:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
    ~x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.2[qt3support,-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.2', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-dbus:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
    ~x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2-r2', 'merge')


!!! The following update(s) have been skipped due to unsatisfied dependencies
!!! triggered by backtracking:

x11-libs/qt-assistant:4
x11-libs/qt-svg:4
x11-libs/qt-test:4
x11-libs/qt-script:4
x11-libs/qt-webkit:4
x11-libs/qt-opengl:4

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]

Thank you,

Alan