It has just happened in the last day that whenever I try to navigate to a
certain subdirectory of my home directory, in order to attach a file to an
email in gmail, firefox hangs.  I have tried a few experiments, with no
success.  This is also no ordinary directory---it has been under git control
for several months.

With any file manager this directory is accessible.  With Konqueror, it is
likewise accessible.  Only with Firefox and Epiphany, as far as I can tell,
is this happening.

I have copied the contents of the directory, without the .git control
baggage, and the same happens.

This happened concurrently with an upgrade to a new firefox and xulrunner:
mozilla-firefox-3.5.2-r2.  I down graded by masking this version (and
xulrunner were also downgraded when I did this), and the same problem
persisted.  I had run revdep-rebuild after upgrading to the newer firefox,
by the way.

This reminds me of a situation some months ago, when a specific home
directory was impossible to browse in either nautilus, or firefox.  This was
due to a peculiar file, I cannot remember the name, but bizaare.  When I
finally found this file deep in the subdirectories, the problem went away.

Thinking the same thing was going no here, I have looked at the directory,
but superficially I have seen nothing.  Except a file ".directory" left
there by dolphin.  I have recently installed kde 4.3.0, and started liking
it a bit, and playing around with it.

I don't know what else to look for, or what method to use, to look for
bizaare bits in a tree.

I suppose I will copy all the files over, one at a time.  Suggestions would
be appreciated.


Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   ----Richard Feynman