there is an extra level of indirection in starting many kde apps from the
kpanel that causes an unnecessary empty konsole window to appear in
addition to the desired kde app ...

for examples try starting from the kde panel:

start a shell from the kde panel:  two windows appear, one titled Konsole
(with no content), and another titled (on my machine)
root.redhat.com: /root that contains a bash shell session in it
...

try starting kdvi:  two windows appear, one titled "DVI Viewer" (with no
content) and then another called "kdvi" that contains the appropriate
program ...