Hi,
I have the same symptoms with my setup now and then. Also sometimes kstars stays active, but parking is really weird.
I'm not certain the 'illness' is the same, but my suspicion is that it has to do with how ioptron parks the mount.
More specifically, imaging -after- the mount has been parked before during that session.
When using the parking command from the handcontroller, it parks and then 'blocks out'. Maybe this has to do with it?
In that case, here is an idea for a driver feature:
Parking emulation. Issue a goto (horizon, North for example) and disengage tracking.