To reply to my own message:

further debugging seems to show this is all the way deep down in kde at
kinit or earlier:

arg[1] = http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem (0x80513a6)
KInit: argc[1] = 'http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem' 

(note that the & and everything after it is gone).

-- 
  Preston Brown
  pbrown@redhat.com                                Red Hat, Inc.