Hmm. current state, default ulimit -n for me is 64.

lsof tells me (after I ulimit -n 256) that Mozilla has 117 open file
descriptors, to fetch one https:// url. Thats a lot of open associations. Is it
really that fragmented, and has to keep that many live? (shrug)

I wonder if my problem was resource starvation in some non-fatal way which also
hit the XFree86?

Why would I suddenly get this, after a current (as of 2-3 days ago) re-sync, and
a remake of X11? Did something change in the default runtime env? Something in
kernel sizing space?

-George