Whenever I try to launch Konsole, the program opens, then immediately closes.

If I start Konsole from xterm, I get the following message:

$ konsole
konsole(1878)/kdeui (KIconLoader) KSharedDataCache::Private::mapSharedMemory: Failed to establish shared memory mapping, will fallback to private memory -- memory usage will increase
$

Any thoughts?

I finally fixed the problem with a solution I found on another site...

in the file ~/.shrc comment out the line "set -o emacs"

Konsole loads up now, but it still leaves the same error message if loaded up from xterm.

This is probably because your system doesn't not support multi-process mutexes, or because it is not possible to access various files under /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/

Note that Linux does support multi-process mutexes.