I haven't done the upgrade, however it sounds to me if your permissions are alright and new user accounts are okay then I'd have to say that something in the account structure may have changed during the upgrade. I'm guessing that the change is causing the old accounts to become unreadable to a certain extent.
I guess I can't help you with any other suggestions, but if new accounts are working then use the new accounts and hopefully the impact is minimal.

You know, I would agree with you except for one thing that gives me pause...

I have NOT created any new accounts. Before the upgrade I had a total of 4 accounts on the machine, including root. This doesn't seem to affect anything but Mozilla, Firefox and Epiphany, and only with MY login -- I tested all the others and they're fine.

So, why was MY login account affected, but not theirs? Although I am still a newbie with SuSE, I've worked for years with UNIX and many other OS's in a technical capacity...it seems to me that maybe there's another package installed that may be interferring here? Or there may be some desktop setting that I munged?

Just for giggles create a new account. Delete all the files and directories that go with it then copy over everything from the bad home directory into the new account directory. You will then need to reapply the permissions to all these files to the new user name and see if that profile works. It's gotta be a corrupt file or something in that /home folder for you and this would prove it. I guess the problem then is finding what file or files are bad.

I'll try this tonight, and let you know what happens --

Thanks!

well, I have done exactly that. created a new account, emptied it, copied EVERYTHING from my old account over to the new one, canged permissions and ... hey, it works just fine, including firefox, mozilla, epiphany and so on.
The good thing is, I have my working environment back.
The bad thing is: I still don't understand what had happened to my old user account.....

and now the new account begins to misbehave as well. For a few days everything worked just fine, but suddenly I can't start the GIMP anymore, Firefox doesn't load, Mozilla doesn't.... exactly the same as before. I have neither changed any of the settings nor have I installed anything new. I'm simply baffled.... Maybe I should do a clean install

You know, same here. But -- the other accounts are still fine. What is this fresh hell??

HOWEVER -- I did -- for grins and giggles -- do a repair check and it found some weirdness in the filesystem. Supposedly it repaired it, but there's still a problem.

Man, I wish I wasn't so stubborn. I have this deep-seated reluctance to do a fresh install; I keep feeling like it's something silly that I missed somewhere. <sigh>

snickdog (who hates giving up, it's far too personal now...)

that's it now. the problems got worse and worse. tonight I'll do a new install

argggghhhhhh!!!!!
new install went smoothly, but then:................ firefox doesn't start, the GIMP doesn't start, Mozilla doesn't start.... back on square one it seems.

Now, someone on a German board mentions that de-installing qtk-qt-engine would solve the problem (sort of good to see that others suffer too). I'm gonna give this a try.