I just reinstalled my workstation, and noticed a strange behaviour in KDE. Every KDE application idled for like 30 seconds before opening a web connection, while non-KDE applications were blazingly fast. It took that time to do the nameserver lookup, to be precise.

After I changed my nameserver entry in /etc/resolv.conf from my local wireless router's IP to my that of my ISP's DNS, it all worked fine. Weird, eh?