Comment 2 for bug 108630

I can confirm that this is the case. It seems that there is a chain of dependencies here.

sudo apt-cache depends kcontrol | grep kicker
  Depends: kicker

shows that kcontrol does actually depend on kicker. Equally:

sudo apt-cache depends kde-systemsettings | grep kcontrol
  Depends: kcontrol

shows that kde-systemsettings depends on kcontrol and

sudo apt-cache depends konqueror | grep kcontrol
  Depends: kcontrol

shows that konqueror also depends on kcontrol. I haven't checked but I would guess that the other packages depend on konqueror. So it seems that kicker is used for more than just the kde panel. This might be a bug but it looks more like it is intentional