In KDE 4.8.4 (running on Debian Wheezy), the following situation occurs after 20% of boots: (A) global keyboard shortcuts don't work, and (B) panel icons don't load, leaving an awkward mix of the KDE panel theme and the standard icons for KMix, Nepomuk, etc. I suspect this is the result of some daemon or other failing to load, or crashing immediately after startup. Has anyone else experienced similar behavior? This was not an issue in previous versions of KDE 4, and I've yet to find a way to remedy it without rebooting.

Global keyboard shortcuts are supported by "kglobalacceld", at least in reasonably new versions of KDE. I can't recall at which point it was split out of "kded4".

I can confirm the out of place KMix, etc is caused by them operating in legacy mode because the new system tray mechanism isn't functioning. This is usually caused by kded4 crashing.

Do you see any "KDE Crash Assistant" windows during the login process? If you do, can you get information from the "Developer Information" tab please and post it here so we can investigate?

Thanks for the response, bcooksley. No crash assistant windows appear during the login process, surprisingly; if one did, I would certainly post the dev info here. I will take a closer look at kglobalacceld and post anything that might be of further help.

Oops, it is actually "kglobalaccel" in terms of a process name. You should be able to find it at /usr/bin/kglobalaccel.
If it is not present, and your package manager shows everything to be fine, then you probably have a kded hosted version of kglobalacceld.

Thanks again for you help, bcooksley. After looking into kglobalaccel, I find that it is running normally, strangely enough. Attempting to restart it with

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killall kglobalaccel
kglobalaccel


does not fix the problem. Global shortcuts are still broken, and the KMix, Klipper, and NepomuK icons are still un-themed. Annoyingly, this is still an inconsistent bug--global shortcuts work after *most* KDE logins, and, when they don't, the login process goes as smoothly as ever.

For the system tray icons - the failing process is actually "kded4".
If it is running, it may have crashed and subsequently relaunched - and certain modules aren't loaded if it is restarted automatically.

I'm not sure why global shortcuts aren't working in some circumstances when "kglobalaccel" is running though. You might want to check to see if KWin has any shortcut suppression rules active for certain applications.

For the system tray icons - the failing process is actually "kded4".
If it is running, it may have crashed and subsequently relaunched - and certain modules aren't loaded if it is restarted automatically.

Thanks very much, that was it. Restarting kded4 and kglobalaccel fixes shortcuts and the panel scheme, although only kded4 seems to have crashed. I'm still not sure what's crashing kded4, but at least it's easily restarted.

Can you please check ~/.xsession-errors for the phrase "Segmentation fault"?
I suspect a type of uncatchable error - infinite stack recursion - may be resulting in the kded4 crash.

Both daemons are running spotlessly at the moment, and

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grep -i "segmentation fault" ~/.xsession-errors

returns nothing. I'll look again the next time kded4 crashes and post whatever output is produced.

As of KDE 4.10.4, this is no longer a problem; panel icons and shortcuts load 100% of the time.

Awesome. If this happens again, please don't hesitate to reopen the topic.

hi guys!
Sorry for reopening this old thread but I have the exact same issue with the kded4 service not correctly starting at login and all my custom shortcuts are not working until I restart the service.
This problem happens about 50% of the time. When I login the kded4 deamon is running but my global shortcuts are not working. Then I manually kill kded4 and start kded4, after this everything is woking fine. I had this problem for a long time, more than one year. In this time I have updated a couple of versions of KDE but the problems is still present. I'm using Gentoo. Current version:

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~ $ kded4 --version
Qt: 4.8.5
KDE Development Platform: 4.11.2
KDE Daemon: 4.11.2

in the .xsession-errors ther is no "segmentation faults", in fact the only line that mentions kded4 is the following:
kded(3575)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:

When kded4 is not functioning properly, does running "qdbus org.kde.kded /kded" lead to any response (should be immediate)?
If it does not, please attach a debugger to kded4, generate a full backtrace and post it here.

I did this, but there is no immediate response. The command responds with the following after about 30 seconds:

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~ $ qdbus org.kde.kded /kded
Error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply
Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

Okay, that is the broken response I was expecting. Please attach a debugger to kded4 and provide a backtrace so we can continue to investigate.