Im having problems trying to use my custom iptables firewall rules. The rules themselves work fine; there is no problem with them, its just the effect that its having on my system. After Ive ran the scripts, Konqueror will take ages to load, which is strange because it usually takes only a couple of seconds.

First of all I thought it was a problem with Suse's personal firewall, which I disabled, and tried running my firewall script again. I got the same problems.
Then I thought it might be that I had checked the 'protect from internal network' and 'protect network services' (or whatever they're called) boxes when setting up the personal firewall, I unchecked these and disabled the personal firewall and ran the script again. Still I get the same problems.

Im not sure why Konqueror becomes so slow to load when I load iptables rules into the kernel ?

Dont suppose anyone could help me out on this one ??

Its ok, I managed to solve the problem. It was nothing more than an error on my behalf - I forgot to add some rules to deal with the Loopback address (127.0.0.1), so thats why Konqueror wouldnt start/was very slow to load.

So, if your writing your own custom firewall rules, remember: you need rules to deal with the loopback address - otherwise you end up with stupid problems like mine

Adding a rule, something along these lines, will solve the [dumb] problem described above:

# create a new chain called LOOPBACK
iptables -N LOOPBACK
# Allow ALL connections to the LOOPBACK addy (127.0.0.1) -- VERY IMPORTANT
iptables -A LOOPBACK --dst 127.0.0.1 -j ACCEPT