Comment 23 for bug 378394

IMO the whole approach is wrong.
A programshould NEVER run as root, wether with sudo, su, kdesudo or whatever.
QT/GTK code is not needed to run as root, and the much better approach in general would be to tightly bind to policykit and letting just the things go as root that need to. The GUI components don't need to be root.

in the case of kate or dolphin - It would be MUCH better to have a possibility to let the user edit the file or doing some stuff in dolphin, and IF the user wants to do something that he isn't allowed to (save file in /etc/... or move some root files in dolphin THEN ask him for a password (or ask policykit) to gain the rights.

That would be a true fix of all these problems.
Everything else is frickling around, trying to make things "work somehow" - workarounds.

IIRC nautilus has this in some way, hasn't it? To ask you for the password if you want to copy a file into a folder you haven't write access?