KMail hangs

I've got an ongoing problem that I've posted about before. I've recently  
done some research as to what, *exactly* the problem is. I've narrowed it 
down somewhat. It appears that Akonadi keeps running because there's some 
socket/file still active even after shutting down KMail.

Quick summary of the problem--- I access my linux box at home from my 
Windows workstation at the office via SSH and VNC. When I leave for the day, 
if I close everything down, including the VNC server, KMail hangs when I 
get back to the local console and attempt to send an email.

I checked recently just before leaving the office and found the following 
file/process still running:
john     12234  0.0  0.1 271880  6384 ?        S    06:21   0:00 kdeinit4: 
kio_file [kdeinit] file local:/tmp/ksocket-john/klauncherMT3445.slave-socket 
local:/tmp/ksocket-john/kmailCP9404.slave-socket

Now, I'm no programmer, so I don't know  exactly what it means. All I know 
is that this file/process is still running so Akonadi hangs, or Akonadi 
hangs so this file/process is still running. Either way, Akonadi is still 
running when I get home and trying to send an email (everything works fine 
until I go to send) results in KMail hanging, and I have to manually kill 
all the KMail related processes from the command line.

I would appreciate it if someone could take a look at that. Any suggestions 
on how to avoid this problem? Perhaps I should switch to Evolution or 
Thunderbird? I don't really *want* to switch as I have several years' worth 
of messages tied up in KMail, not to mention I'd have to configure another 
email client and all the filters, etc.

If I could just get this one glitch resolved, it would solve 99.9% of my 
problems! :-)