As it turns out, after having spent far too much time trying to debug this, I found a bug in Kopete that was causing the problems with using a SOCKS proxy in KDE. Along the way, I learned that a SOCKS proxy feature is built right into SSH!!! ssh -D causes SSH to act as a SOCKS 4/5 proxy!! Now that is sweet!!

Anyway, here are all the gory, copius details. Go, bug-fixer guys!! =:)