just solved another mystery that was dazzling my mind on a small project regarding TYPO3 version 4.4 alpha2 where the frontend worked like expected but the project code (that was updated from version 4.2.6) showed an ugly distorted backend.
all styles and javascript functions were gone!
i cleared any temporary data collection, checked rewrites, paths, everything was ok. i reloaded the sources
but it did not change anything. but when i started to delete all those extension corpses in typo3conf/ext/ i got one idea. extension pmktextarea integrated okay in backend in former t3 installations… and as i saw, it still did and somehow seemed to overwrite essential js for the backend. deleted the folder, cleared the TEMP* files in typo3conf/ and reloaded the backend. worked. phewww…