to reply to my own mail.. Since gnome went to 2.10.0 and firefox went to
1.0.2 I did a complete re-build, and all three firefox problems seem to
be gone now.

the libwallet.so problem went first, back when people explained how this
should be removed from the build.

I think the gconf2 related problem with downloads and popups got fixed in
the gnome-2.10.0 upgrade, likewise the stuck background process problem.

cheers
	-george