Use a slightly more intelligent way of detecting whether the D-Bus daemon is running: instead of trying to kill -0 it, try to connect to its address (using qdbus).

This has the added benefit that it works with the autolaunch method that was introduced with D-Bus 0.94. If you're using 0.94, you no longer need to run "eval `dbus-launch --auto-syntax`" before starting your KDE4 applications (this is valid for individual applications, not just startkde).

Note: this requires qdbus to be in your $PATH. But everyone has Qt 4.2's bindir there, right?