rxvt spawns konsole after 3.6 --why?

[My_old_email_is_gone]

Greetings.
I've waited a long time to post this because I thought maybe it was just a glitch in 3.7 and 3.8, but then 3.9 rolled along and it's still the same thing and I've poked around here in the forums a few times figuring someone else would have brought up such a huge issue, but I haven't seen it. If this has already been covered, please just point me to the right thread. I haven't logged in for such a long time I ditched my old e-mail and forgot my password so I had to set up a new account to post this question that has been bugging me for many months.
The story is thus:
I use a lot of terminals on my older machines running Knoppix. When I say a lot of terminals I mean like thirty instances at a time or so per machine. And starting back with 3.2 and all the way through 3.6 I was using Knoppix to do that job in a flawless manner with a syntax like this in a simple shell scipt.

rxvt -geometry 46x9 -e /some_path/some_application -an_arg &
rxvt -geometry 46x9 -e /some_path/some_application -an_arg &
etc
Note, the geometry argument was especially nice since I could have a few dozen screens spread across a few virtual desktops and readily monitor everything that was happening at a glance without having to shuffle through dozens of windows.

And life was good. It worked and it was stable and wonderful. Then around the time of 3.7 the whole world fell apart. Starting with 3.7 and continuing till 3.9, I haven't tried the 4.0 CD version yet, this bizarre new twist gets added. The basic function of the script still works technically, but for some reason it's as though Knoppix is suggesting rxvt is somehow not good enough and the command gets handed over to Konsole. Well, in theory there's little difference, but in practice this totally screws things up.
The primary issue is that when I'm using older machines to run thirty scripts I have them minimally configured so they can just handle that many scripts. When every rxvt session spawns a konsole session it doubles the total number of open consoles to sixty and I run out of memory.
This basic problem doesn't change if I substitute "xterm" or "konsole" for "rxvt"
This is such a fundamental behavior that it seems it can't be right and yet it is the same for every iso I've burnt since 3.6 and I'm pretty sure I've tried them all.
Or, is there another way to do this?
And yes, there is an error that always pops up in that first window that reads

Error: /var/tmpkdecache-knoppix" is owned by uid 100 instead of uid 0.
Link points to "var/tmp/kdecache-root"

Which made me think I needed to run the script as root or as a regular user, but either way I still get this. It seems any time I call a terminal from a script this always happens. Is that just the new way things are done? If so, is there any recommendation about the new way to run terminals from a script so I can control the geometry of the child terminals and avoid these obnoxious double pop-up shells?

[My_old_email_is_gone]

Because if I boot 3.6 with the knoppix26 boot option I get well behaved terminals out of a script. But anything past 3.6 does this dual launch thing.
I'm surprised this isn't a more talked about issue. I'm the only one who launches shells from a script in Knoppix?