Comment 30 for bug 263211

I did try something similar, but for me all the extra clients were opened shortly after login, so not enough time to kill processes before they would spawn multiple instances. I found that I had 183 instances of python running after logging in to KDE. Removing as many startup apps as I could did not identify the problem app, but I found that creating and logging in to a new account didn't exhibit the multiple instances of python and xclients.

My solution was to rename ~/.kde and allow it to be regenerated. This has resolved the problem for me.