Problems with Yakuake 2.9.3 in Ubuntu Intrepi Alpha 3

When I first upgraded to Intrepid about a week ago, I installed Yakuake 2.9.3 from the repos and it worked perfectly as it has always done for me in Ubuntu.

However, this morning, there were a total of 79 updates available which I installed. Immediately afterwards, Yakuake would no longer launch for me. Trying to launch it from a terminal gave this error message:

(5872)/: Communication problem with "yakuake" , it probably crashed.
Error message was: "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken." "

I uninstalled and re-installed Yakuake 2.9.3 but always got the same error.

After quite some time googling and trying various suggestions that I had found, I gave up as none worked and I couldn't see any light at the end of the tunnel.

So, I completely removed Yakuake 2.9.3 and installed Yakuake 2.8.1 from source. Although it installed, it too gave an error when I tried to launch it as follows:

kbuildsycoca running...
DCOP Cleaning up dead connections.
DCOP aborting (delayed) call from 'anonymous-23932' to 'yakuake'
paul@ubuntu-mac:~$ KCrash: Application 'yakuake' crashing...
Could not find 'drkonqi' executable.
KCrash cannot reach kdeinit, launching directly.

So, once again Yakauke failed to launch for me.

Please note that in both cases, Yakuake does actually appear to be running (running ps -e in a terminal) but I cannot get the terminal emulator screen to show itself.

It seems that some change resulting from the upgrade has made the use of Yakauke impossible. I have emailed the Yakuake developer (hein@kde.org) about this problem and maybe he'll have a suggestion.
In the meantime, I'm using Guake (which is a Gnome version of Yakuake). Although I didn't like it when I tried it first (mainly because the window width is not adjustable and I want a small window) this will give me an opportunity to assess Guake more thoroughly.