I have been looking for a way to do this too. So far I have:
Inside your home directory is a file ./kde/share/config/kickerrc that stores preferences for the kicker. The menu [MainPanel] has one entry (kde3.5.1)
UserHidden = false
Changing that to true and restarting kicker using 'dcop kicker kicker restart' restarts the kicker minimised. Tonight though I'm going to try to script it using
kwriteconfig --file kickerrc --group MainPanel --key UserHidden --type bool true
dcop kicker kicker configure
Other usefull Kde commands are kstart, kreadconfig, kconf_update (?), kdialog, kfmclient, kioexec, kde-config. See
http://www.sbox.tugraz.at/home/v/voyager…gkde/index.html
Hope this helps someone