Jan Danielsson <jan.m.danielsson@gmail.com> wrote:
>    Running NetBSD/amd64 3.1, pkgsrc-current..
> 
>    A few days ago, I performed a few updates to my packages. Now,
> Firefox and Thunderbird are behaving flaky at startup. I'd guess about
> half of the time I try to start them, they simply don't show up. The
> processes are running, but I get no visual window.
> 
>    The processes are easily killed (no -9 required), but it's quite
> annoying having to go through the hassle..
> 
>    It may just have been bad luck, but when I had GIMP running, it was
> almost impossible to start Thunderbird.
> 
>    This all happened with the 2.0.0.4 updates, afaict. I had no problems
> prior to the update.


 I've noticed that (from pkgsrc) Firefox 2.0 seems less stable than 1.5
was.  I'm running NetBSD 3.1 on i386.  Firefox doesn't crash nearly as
much as you are describing, but 2.0 certainly crashes a lot more than 1.5
did.


  Perhaps starting gimp or firefox with ktrace might reveal something?

ktrace firefox

# then after the crash:
kdump


 You may want to make sure you have a lot of free space on the CWD of the
file system where you start it, the ktrace may record firefox doing quite
a lot before the crash. :)

 -johan