I don't know the logic of the underlying code, but
look in the
installed d3lphin.desktop file. You'll find two keys: MimeType and
InitialPreference. Experiment with commenting out one or both and
see how that affects your usage. You might need to restart Trinity
or delete your tdesycoca cache files. Probably the best experiment
is with a temporary fresh profile. That way no profilerc changes
will affect anything.
I don't believe a distro-specific patch should be necessary. We
should patch the behavior for everybody. Dolphin should not
override anything until the user explicity starts doing so in the
file association configurations.
By the way,please share the exact steps you used that I can
duplicate that prompted you to start this discussion. :)
I'd like to test this further with other apps too.
Darrell