Comment 3 for bug 1164236

I've actually rebuilt kubuntu's plasma active source packages (contour, kde-artwork-active, startactive, plasma-mobile, share-like-connect) on debian unstable, so I'm not sure how much my experience applies to this bug. I noticed that that in /usr/bin/startactive someone had wisely commented:

# There's something wrong with d-bus invocation,
# so we are doing a rather dirty forced-launch
# before the real startactive is run

# pkill -u ${USER} dbus-launch
# pkill -u ${USER} dbus-daemon

# unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
# unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID

# export `dbus-launch`
# sleep 3

Uncommenting these last 6 commands allowed plasma active to start without crashing on my system. Your mileage may vary.