Yeah, it is a bit of a workaround, but it works! I only recently found out about that annoying icon - I don't use KDE so I never noticed it! I only discovered it when I was setting up one of my other computers to be my office workhorse for when I am on teaching placement... I set the computer up so that both myself and my mother can use it - I
will get my family to use Linux! - and I thought that having individual icons on the desktop for each device was a more sensible idea than that silly thing! I couldn't find where it was generated (not that I really looked that hard at all - I am quite lazy when it comes to stuff like that
), so I just whipped it up. Since it is only a subdirectory off ~/Desktop, it wasn't too hard to remove it.
Glad I could help.