creator-gdb attaches to wrong process

Two symptoms;

1) when I start qtcreator from a konsole with '&', and then I start an application in the debugger, sometimes the app freezes.
When typing 'jobs' in that konsole I learn that the app no longer is running in the background but has been stopped. I then have to type 'bg' in that konsole to get qtcreator to again do things.
Notice that the app I wanted to start in the debugger is only actually started after I typed 'bg'

2) After starting an app in the debugger and some time passes, I get a popup from QtCreator which states that "GDB Not Responding".
Defaulting to "Stop Debugging"
Notice that debugging works just fine.

so, my naive conclusion is that the helper process is trying to do things to qtcreator itself while it really should have been doing things to the (not yet existing) child process.