Hello,

This is only a vague guess but it might help:

I had trouble with extremly long application starting times with
KDE 3.1.4 (compiled from pkgsrc, login into it as root). A look 
at the Xfree86 logs showed, that KDE wasn't able to resolve the 
hostname of my box (which was disconnected from LAN/INET 
at this time).

After adding my IP/hostname to /etc/hosts the problems went away.

Your problem might be located in the same direction:

> Could not read network connection /home/rsb/DCOPserver_byrd__0

HTH

-Alex