I've searched but can't find an answer to this one. I guess I might be using incorrect search terms but ...
When I open galeon, it opens countless copies of itself. It didn't always do this. The only cure seems to be removing galeon completely and then reinstalling it. This has happened on my laptop, my work desktop and on home desktop. They all run SuSe 8.2. This doesn't happen immediately after an install but it soon happens.
please help!!

I had the same thing happen, I never looked into the bug reports though b/c I switched (and now use exclusily) to Mozilla-Firebird. I would go to the Galeon home page and sniff around there. Because it happened to you on a couple of different machines it may be a bug...try to recreate the bug and submit a report if you like.

Do you change your default homepage? If so, then check out that it is written nicely - I have seen some that do some weird things! Also, try opening it with an exclusive website parameter, so for example galeon http://www.google.com and see if it does the same thing.

I have Debian 3.0r1 with some parts from Debian/testing. Reinstalling Galeon didn't help. Not even removing Galeon with dpkg -P (purge, destroys Galeon's config. files) and then reinstalling. I deleted the .galeon and .mozilla directories in my homedir, and Galeon went through the "first time" questions, but kept opening windows after I had finished with them.

I have visited no "evil" pages, and have disabled JavaScript and Java, and my startpage is www.kernel.org

I have updated Galeon a couple of times, but the problem has persisted. Opening with exclusive website parameter didn't help.

Reinstalling helped for me in the end - I downloaded a version (as opposed to using the one that came with SuSe 8.2) - problem gone!! The same thing happened with Webmin - a fresh install with a non-SuSe package made it work.
Good luck.