Firefox, Thunderbird, and gkrellm have been crashing dozens or hundreds of times a day last 2 or 3 days. I get segmentation fault messages on all three. Since gkrellm shares with the browser and email programs only the use of X resources and Gnome toolkit and other display-oriented processes, I suspect something to do with X. I made no system changes prior to these crashes beginning, however. They just started. Sometimes when I click on a button in T-bird or Firefox the program just disappears and there’s a segmentation fault message in console 1. Gkrellm just disappears time and again all by itself—but of course it’s constantly updating its displays. Again, I get a segmentation fault message.

The message on T’bird is always:

--and I get the same message referring to Firefox, when it crashes.

No other programs but those three are affected so far.

I plan to run memtest when I have several hours for it to run unhindered.

Looking at hundreds of posts on Google about the same problem (with T’bird and Firefox) and the same searching here, I found nothing concrete to help me.

What’s the best way to start troubleshooting something like this?

This info is something useless, but it happens to me too, under SuSE 9.0

Not useless at all! It appears it happens to a number of people (to judge from Google search).

If it was a hard disk problem, I'd expect other programs to fail, too, not just those three.

Furthermore, I had to do a re-install of Mandrake 10.1 OE due to wiping out some libraries. I did the "upgrade" version, which preserves almost everything intact. It usually fixes serious problems like that, and it did this time.

The strange thing is, after the re-installation, Firefox and Thunderbird still fail but far, far less often. Gkrellm still fails many times a day.

Completely puzzled.

Here's some more info, as I too have a similiar problem.
I am running Fedora Core III fully updated and just recently reinstalled fresh.

I have Firefox 1.0.2. Everythingw as working great until I installed The Java Runtime ENviroment 1.5. I was following the exact instructions from Sun itself at http://java.com/en/download/help/5000010500.xml#enable. I ran the installation and everything went fine. I went to the firefox plugins directory and created a symobolic link to java, and restarted the browser. Every time after that I got the following:

[root@struik firefox-1.0.2]# ./firefox
./run-mozilla.sh: line 159: 5730 Segmentation fault "$prog" ${1+"$@"}


After I removed the symoblic link to java in /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.2/plugins Firefox came back to life.

So, it appear, at least in my case, that Sun's Java is the culprit.
Does anyone out there know how to make this work? I need java installed so I can run some applets and so I can run the Arsenal Sever for a college course I am taking.

PS: A classmate of mine who is running FCIII on a laptop is having the same issue. Add him to the list of people with problems too.

I have FC3 with that version of Java and I have repaired the sym link. The only problem I have is periodically I have some core.#### files being dumped.

On top of that I have several boxes of FC3 where I have done the same thing to all of them yet only one has the core.#### dump files.

I have updated my suse 9.1 box too.

Although I believe there is some instability created by some update, probably something done via yum from a patch that RH did that they didn't fully check out, but I'm only guessing.

Now, aside from those things the machines are reliable and continue to work. Technically I see few crashes of programs.

If there is a problem caused by RH they know about it most likely and the problem with FOSS is that they don't have an obligation to announce it nor provide fixes, except in their own good time.

Continuining....If you are crashing either the workstation or regularly in programs (hundreds of times a day is alot) you need to examine your hardware. As the owner of a small business that repairs and upgrades computers, one thing I find is that there's no predictable time when a problem with hardware can crop up. So, the general rule is: You don't resolve software problems before determining if there's a hardware problem first. No matter what you think of your system you need to throughly test your hardware before concluding it is a software issue.

I started to write about my Java experiences but realized it was just babbling that didn't help anything. Basically, I've had no problem other than getting apps to know where the Java files are. But I haven't tried Java with Firefox 1.0.1 and probably won't...

Other than that, I had to do a COMPLETE reinstall (partitioning etc.) about two weeks ago due to operator error (me) resulting in libraries being wiped out, bash wiped out, boot sector wiped out... After about fifteen hours' work I was back in operation with my apps in place again--and have not had a single segmentation error since then. Firefox and Thunderbird both stay put and behave.

I'll never know what was wrong, but it was apparently something other than Firefox and Thunderbird, for I am using the exact same installations I had before (home directory was not touched).

Mysteries continue....

I Followed the instructions at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/answers.php?action=viewarticle&artid=285

Howver, I made one change. In the line that says:

"ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.1_01/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin)oji.so"

I ran

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_02/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

The most important thing to note is that I used ns7 , not ns7-gcc32

Now everything works fine