digikam4 does not display images or thumnails in kde4

Sometimes (maybe 40% of the time) I can start digikam4 in ubuntu and have it work correctly. When it does not work correctly the problem is that I cannot see thumbnails in the main view and get messages like this on the terminal: digikam(20525): couldn't create slave: "Unable to create io-slave: klauncher said: Unknown protocol 'digikamalbums'.

On ubuntu I have found the way to fix this is to run this command and then restart the digikam script:
"killall klauncher && killall kdeinit4 && killall kded4"

This was initially reported here at http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165885

I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 with the gnome desktop with all updates.
I have also tried it on the kde4 desktop, but the situation is worse. In this case it almost never starts correctly, but the killall commands cause other problems.
The digikam4 is the latest SVN of exiv2, libs, digikam.

I have no clue whether this is due to my startup/compile script, digikam4, or kde.
The script I use sets several environment variables, one which is below..
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#!/bin/bash
DIGIKAMKDE4=/home/gsking/programs/src/svn/digikam4/build
export KDEDIR=$DIGIKAMKDE4:/usr/lib/kde4
export KDEDIRS=$DIGIKAMKDE4:/usr/lib/kde4
export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt4
export PATH=$DIGIKAMKDE4/bin:/usr/local/bin:$QTDIR/bin:$KDEDIR/bin:$QTDIR/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH
/kde4/libexec:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
digikam
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