After a little research I found the following:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=132157&highlight=kopete+icq+protocol
have not tried out so far, but looks promising:
Original von danthe
In /usr/lib/kde3, there were some old .la files. After I removed them (rm /usr/lib/kde3/kopete_*) and restarted kopete, everything worked correctly again.
I only had to restart kopete. There's no need to re-emerge anything, not even reset of restart kde...
-s.