Bug 311989

For reasons that I have yet to nail down my plasma desktop has been crashing with some frequency. Each time it does the system tray grows with blank entries. These entries don't respond to any input, but they do show up in System Tray Settings -> Entries, with names like ":1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1", and seem to be associated with one of the applets loaded in the system tray, like Kmix, Klipper, Kmail, etc.
Each time plasma crashes a new set of these ghost notifications is created (generally one for each of the KDE apps that has an icon in the system tray).  Restarting the associated application clears out its associated ghost notifications.

Per forum recommendations (http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=108998), I ran the following command before and after a couple of the crashes:
qdbus org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher /modules/statusnotifierwatcher org.kde.kded.StatusNotifierWatcher.RegisteredStatusNotifierItems

Pre-crash results:
:1.30/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.110/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/pithos
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-19229-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-8555-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-17519-784/StatusNotifierItem

After the first crash:
:1.30/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.110/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/pithos
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-19229-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-18514-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-24696-1/StatusNotifierItem
:1.1513/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.5214/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-17519-1456/StatusNotifierItem

After closing one app, restarting another, a couple more crashes, and restarting another:
:1.30/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.110/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/pithos
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-19229-1/StatusNotifierItem
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-18514-1/StatusNotifierItem
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-10235-1/StatusNotifierItem
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/2
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/2
:1.6590/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
:1.1601/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/3
:1.6590/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/2
:1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/3
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-27937-2/StatusNotifierItem

doing some more qdbus introspection, I couldn't find any way to clear these out aside from just quitting and restarting the associated application.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start one or more applications with System Tray icons, like Kmix and Klipper
2. Induce a crash in plasma (in my case, the crashes seem to be related to my starting and stopping of activties using the Miniweb plasmoid: http://opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=138924)
Actual Results:  
3. Observe extra blank spaces in the system tray (the tray grows but no new icons appear, any-clicking on the empty space does nothing).
3 a. Open the System Tray settings -> entries, observe various additional entries with names like :1.4332/org/kde/statusnotifieritem/1
3 b. run the aforementioned qdbus command and see the additional notification entries.

Expected Results:  
no ghost entries

I've been observing this behavior since I upgraded (K)Ubuntu 12.04 from KDE 4.8 to 4.9 (running plasma-desktop in 4.8 was practically unusable, so I don't know if the bug was around at that time; on a previous install I had been running ubuntu 10.04 with KDE 4.5 without problems, this install is almost completely from scratch with only minimal settings/themes copied over)