Tried it over here, but the application links I create are not owned by root.
The fact that yours are owned by root however does not mean that the application that is launched is run under root.
What you can try is to copy the directory KDEDIR/share/templates
to
[KDE_HOME/share/
(KDEDIR is the directory of your kde-installation, like /opt/kde3, or /usr/lib/kde, KDE_HOME is the directory of your kde configuration, like ~/.kde or ~/.kde3)
To restore your own file permissions, do as root:
chown -R username.group /home/username