Having another issue with rekonq...When i set my home page to google.co.uk, whenever i close the small google chrome advert in the top right corner, on a browser restart or even page refresh, the ad returns. From what i gather when i press the X icon to close the advert, a cookie should be set for future visits, but obviously it is not sticking or happening at all.

Google are known to fiddle with their code almost on a daily basis (scrollbars as an example), and as it is in their best interest for you to see this ad I'm not surprised to hear this.
Merely posting to say this may not be entirely the fault of Rekonq, though I don't know for sure.

As a workaround for this you could probably configure Rekonq to send a Google Chrome User Agent, which may fool Google's servers into not sending you this advert (assuming javascript isn't used at runtime...)