Hi,
I'm seeing the following strange thing:

Lately I try to log into my kubuntu 12.04 (yeah, I know I should upgrade ...) and kde hangs so I cannot even log out!
I resorted to killing the X-server but this didn't really help.

Today I have had some time to dig into this further and I have found that there was an instance of kate
which the session manager(?) apparently wants to (re-)start.
When I kill this instance (log into a virtual terminal and run "killall /usr/bin/kate"),
a window appears
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| The KDE Session Manager |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
|KDEInit could not launch '/usr/bin/kate'|
+-----------------------------------------------------+
and I can use the session, but when I log out and re-login, the same thing starts all over again.

I have already enabled Settings -> System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Session Management -> Start with an empty session
and logged out and logged in again (several times) to no avail: while no other applications are now being re-started,
the SM still wants to start kate and I have to kill it to be able to log-out again.

There is no mention of kate anywhere in ~/.kde.
I tried replacing kate with a shell script just "exit 0"-ing or with a binary that explicitly crashes (write to virtual address 0) in the hope that the session manager thinks it has done its duty ... no improvement!

Does anyone have an idea where I can look and find who's trying to start kate?

Apparently it was caused by a script in .kde/Autostart which was supposed to backup a set of files by calling rsync in the background (nohup rsync ... > /dev/null 2>&1&).
I removed that script in Settings -> System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Autostart and now the problem is gone. Wierd.
Unfortunately the script was removed so I cannot post its contents