Question: How did you upgrade? Can we see your repos?
zypper lr -d
between CODE tags, the # in the ribbon.
BTW: Just checked my Leap 42.3, using Konqueror as a filemanager works fine here.
And no, AFAIK Konqueror is not being killed.
To the last question: Start konqueror from a terminal window ( type “konque” and hit TAB ) and have a look at the output.