NOT AN ISSUE: just an update and a thank you for your guidance.
I am happily and smoothly using Irixium. I regret wasting your time because of bugs (and so many of them) in Kubuntu 22.04. There were a number of updates which corrected theme installation errors, of other affected themes as well.
P.S: FYI, it's the qtvirtualkeyboard-plugin.so file that needs to be disabled to eliminate the virtual keyboard and access the Irixium login screen directly. I didn't know where to post this.
Thanks again,