With this new "activity" scheme, it has become very obscure as to how
to go about preventing the stinking thing from starting up multiple
Skype instances. Skype is very clever about restarting itself upon
KDE bringup, but does not provide a convenient way to say, "just do it
once". So I have *three* instances all competing to connect to skype.
First one up claims the connection and if it wasn't the one last logged
in, then the last one logged in doesn't get to because it sees the other
instance got up first. I just want one, but peering into the .kde*
home directories give me no clue and the cashew gives me no hints either,
though it *will* let me add widgets. (This is a "widget", yes?)

Skype isn't a KDE application, it's a Qt application and a proprietary one at best, and likely doesn't play well with the session handling of activities.

Unfortunately, being it closed source, it's difficult that such a problem can be fixed.

This doesn't sound related to Activities, but to the session management. Have you set up Skype to autostart? What's your setting in System Settings -> System Administration -> Session Management -> On Login? You can try to add skype to "Applications to be excluded from sessions".

Hans wrote:Have you set up Skype to autostart?

Skype does it itself. I'd be just as happy manually firing it off.

What's your setting in System Settings -> System Administration -> Session Management -> On Login? You can try to add skype to "Applications to be excluded from sessions".

In configure desktop -> system admin -> startup and shutdown -> session management
"Restore previous session" is marked. Default, I assume. I think also my preference,
except the last session has always had the extra Skypes shut down and the remaining
one logged in. However, I've added "skype" to the previously empty
"Applications to be excluded from sessions". Thanks for the tip! Regards, Bruce