DigiKam woes

Archimedes reproducibly failed to connect to my digital camera with digiKam, with the following message:
'Failed to connect to the camera. Please make sure it is connected properly and turned on. Would you like to try again?'
Root access worked.
The omniscient Google came up with two answers:

1. Modify udev rules (from hyperborea.org). I had to change the print-camera-list syntax listed there to
   print-camera-list udev-rules version 0.98 group users … to get it working (probably different libgphoto2 version). Didn't solve my problem though and I never had that particular issue elsewhere, so I think the rules issue might be fixed by now.
   
2. A discussion on the openSuSE forums pointing to an old HAL bug.

In the end, I traced the error back to an old Konqueror/KDE3 automount interface popping up after some time. digiKam connected faultlessly after I cancelled the automount window. (I should really remove the KDE3 remnants…)