gnome problem

[John Thompson]

gnome is giving me problems today.  I have been using Thunderbird for 
mail and Firefox for web (both installed from tarballs, not rpms) and 
been happy.  When I clicked on a link from Thunderbird, it would 
automatically open a Firefox window to display it; all was good.

Today, I decided to install the mozilla-1.7.2 rpms using yum, just to 
see how mozilla's been getting along lately.  They installed fine; no 
complaints. But mozilla decided to make itself the default URL handler, 
which I did not want -- mozilla's just too big for quickly checking URL 
links.  Ok, fine.  I'll use the "Preferences...File types and programs" 
dialog to change it back.  So I replace mozilla with 
"/usr/local/firefox/firefox %s" and test it out.  Firefox complained
about my profile being in use and wanted to create a new profile to open 
the link.  Whatever.

I remembered there are some arcane hoops one must jump through to get 
firefox to use an existing session, so I decided to change the URL 
handler to something else while I figured it out. "dillo" is a nice, 
lightweight browser for this type of thing, so I changed it to 
"/usr/local/bin/dillo %s", tested it and it worked, so I went about my 
business.  Logged back in later, clicked on an email link, and lo
and behold, *firefox* is trying to start up again and complaining about 
the profile being in use.  I check the preferences and sure enough, 
"/usr/local/bin/dillo %s" has been replaced by 
"/usr/local/firefox/firefox %s".  WTF? I didn't do this.  I change it
back to dillo, test it and it works. Test it again later and it's gone 
back to "/usr/local/firefox/firefox %s" again!  What's up with this?

Now it seems that nothing I do with this setting sticks -- it *always* 
reverts back to "/usr/local/firefox/firefox %s".  I've tried everything 
I can think of -- using the gconf editor instead of the preferences 
dialog, directly editing the 
".gconf/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/%gconf.xml" file to point to 
dillo, blowing away my user *AND* system gconf directories and restoring 
from backups.  *Nothing* has worked. Gnome is somehow managing to pull 
the value "/usr/local/firefox/firefox %s" out of thin air someplace and 
automatically changes my default URL handler without any intervention on 
my part!

It wouldn't be so bad if "/usr/local/firefox/firefox %s" actually worked 
the way I hoped it would, but with this value firefox complains about 
the profile whenever there's already an active firefox session. I still 
haven't figured out how to get it back to the behavior I prefer (opening 
links in an existing session, and I can't get my fall-back setting
"/usr/local/bin/dillo %s" to last for more than one session.  And even 
if I do eventually figure out how to get the behavior I want, how can I 
be sure that it will actually stick, and gnome won't decide to go back 
to the "/usr/local/firefox/firefox %s" setting that doesn't work?

Anybody have any idea what the h*** is going on here and how to fix it?

-- 

-John (john at os2.dhs.org)