I can confirm that kad (at least for amuled) will only work when starting with Autoconnect=1 in amule.conf. "connect" in amulecmd or amuleweb does not have the effect of connecting to kademlia.
I tried the advice of but to no avail. Kad won't be connected, if not through autoconnect...
@DigitoErgoSum
I don't have any freeze or crash either, when autoconnecting (using CVS-20050910 on Debian Sarge).