For reasons that I have yet to nail down my plasma desktop has been crashing with some frequency. Each time it does the system tray grows with blank entries. These entries don't respond to any input, but they do show up in System Tray Settings -> Entries, with names like ":1.3/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1".
Using qdbus I was able to identify the notifying application (usually one of the applets loaded in the system tray, e.g. klipper, device notifier, printer applet, kmix, etc.), which upon closing and reopening/re-adding clears out the blank entries. I inspected the dbus services using qdbus to see if there was a way to disable them from there, but couldn't find anything:

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$ qdbus :1.3 /org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
method QString org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect()


Any ideas why these show up, if there is another way to get rid of them, and preferably how to prevent them from showing up (though I realize that getting plasma to stop crashing should help in this regard, another forum post may be forthcoming if I need any additional help there)?

System information:
Kubuntu 12.04, KDE 4.9.3 from backports PPA

Are you able to determine if it is always the same application, or if the number of ghost entries is somehow related to the number of applications displaying system tray icons?

Please be aware the Extra Items in System Tray Settings > Entries are actually applets, and are not system tray icons.

I end up getting one ghost entry per applet per crash, so if I have the kmix, klipper, and printer applets running and plasma crashes 4 times, I end up with 12 ghost entries, 4 which are associated with kmix, 4 with klipper and 4 with the printer applet.

Please compare the output of this command before and after a Plasma crash:

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qdbus org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher /modules/statusnotifierwatcher org.kde.kded.StatusNotifierWatcher.RegisteredStatusNotifierItems

Is the duplication present there?

Pre-crash:

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:1.30/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.110/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/pithos
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-19229-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-8555-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-17519-784/StatusNotifierItem


(the :1.30 entry is for my Psi+ IM client)
Post-crash:

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:1.30/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.110/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/pithos
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-19229-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-18514-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-24696-1/StatusNotifierItem
:1.1513/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.5214/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-17519-1456/StatusNotifierItem


After a couple more crashes (one app closed and one restarted after the previous crash, one app restarted after last crash before running the command):

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:1.30/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.110/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/pithos
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-19229-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-18514-1/StatusNotifierItem
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-10235-1/StatusNotifierItem
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/2
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/2
:1.6590/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/3
:1.6590/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/2
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/3
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-27937-2/StatusNotifierItem


It definitely looks like you may have exposed a bug, likely in KDELibs. Can you please file a bug report at bugs.kde.org?

Bug filed: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311989