Yes, I'm advocating for the daemon, not KAlarm.
KAlarm crashes if you look at it funny.
Running KAlarm to get the daemon launched once,
and then battling to kill KAlarm is a little counterintuitive.

Has the Calendar and alarms been working well for you?
That's actually the main thing I want out of KDE.
I'm still trying to stop carrying my Tungsten C for DateBook5,
and nothing in Maemo is working well enough yet.

Could your video problems be swap usage?
Perhaps without KDE running you're not hitting the swap file.