As a normal user mozilla will only partially start and exihibits odd behavior.

As root user all is fine.

Odd behavior:

1) 100% CPU use and no browser window start. It appears that mozilla goes into an infinite loop of some sort. I suspected a corrupt profile so I deleted and created a new profile (mozilla --ProfileManager). Still no go.

2) Browser window starts, but will only open and render links typed directly into the link bar. Hyperlinks never activate, buttons have no action response. Another odd behavior when the window starts in this form is that the home page will not load and the personal bookmars bar has no links displayed. Opening and closing the manage bookmarks will cause the personal bookmarks bar to rerender and display the bookmarks.

Running mozilla as root eliminates all of these behaviors. That would lead me to believe its a permissions problem. But I don't know where to start looking on the files that need user permissions opened up for mozilla to work. I would imagine that the RPM distro would have permissions set up proper.

Any other ideas?

software details: mozilla 1.7.3 on Fedora core 2, gnome desktop v2.6 build date 3/31/2004.

Sorry, I can't help you with your problem in mozilla. However, I recommend you try out Firefox. Head tohttp://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ to download it. BTW I think it's obvious by the link that Firefox is associated with Mozilla...

One thing you might want to try is (I think) as root:
or
(I'm no expert on yum, but I think those are the right commands...)

Finally, welcome to LQ!

I have a sneaking suspicion that my problem was the update I did. The issues started after the last yum update I did. I looked into how to back out of the update, but from what I was reading rpm doesn't have the roll-back capability yet. I could uninstall the last updated packages and reinstall previous versions, but I don't want to do that much work (yes lazy I know).

I did install Firefox as a solution to my browsing issues (it works). But I would still like to know what went wrong so I could fix it. I don't like walking away from an issue just because I don't understand it.

I have a feeling that you will have to uninstall Mozilla and then reinstall it.... But unfortunately, I can't really help you uninstall it, unless:
works... However, you need to know the name of the rpm package used to install it.

As to what went wrong? Don't quote me, but the download yum made may have been corrupt... I'm not sure...

uninstalling and reinstalling (mozilla only) was the first thing I tried, to no effect. Yes, I cleared the cashed rpm packages to make sure yum downloaded a fresh copy, yum also verifies the packages against the MD5 sums, though I've seen reference to that not being perfect.