Recently sometime this week I noticed that I can no longer select files from my users home directory in either gaim (for sending files to people) or firefox (for attaching files in emails). It gives the message permission denied in both cases. I can select files in Konquerer though and in mozilla thunderbird. I thought maybe something screwy was happening with gtk apps but to my knowledge thunderbird is gtk. It's not an rpm but installed from source if that makes a difference.
I don't know why this suddenly happened, the only correlation I can think of is recently I applied a patch in YOU when it alerted me to new security updates. and I believe one had to do with filesystem permissions. Any help would be appreciated. I haven't the slightest idea what to do next. Thank you.

If you updated kernel then it may be. I suggest remove forefox and and install it again either from firefox site of from Guru RPM site

gaim is also affected though, i tried removing gaim and reinstalling from my suse 10 dvd but same problem

One again, Update your softwares from net. Grab the latest packages

unfortunately 32bit versions for suse 10 of gaim and firefox don't exist on either packam or guru site, and I have looked on rpm.pbone.net too, I can't find anything. My kernel version didn't change