It's possibly a distro issue as other people have reported this problem. I'm in touch with someone from openSUSE to see how this can be diagnosed.

My discussion with the openSUSE developer tracked this to a glibc patch: it's not related directly to the upstream KDE.

I just updated openSUSE 11.4 to 12.1 (32 bit) and had the same crashing KDE4 while starting up.
I had a look at
/usr/bin/startkde
The line with "LD_BIND_NOW" was:
LD_BIND_NOW=true /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/start_kdeinit_wrapper +kcminit_startup

So everything in ONE line. - I seperated it that it looks like this:
LD_BIND_NOW=true
/usr/lib/kde4/libexec/start_kdeinit_wrapper +kcminit_startup

Now KDE4 starts up fine.

The downstream issue is being tracked here:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753251

Please note that seperating it will have the same effect as removing the line I believe - as non-exported environment changes are not retained.