Some points to add to this thread:

I rarely see the errors you describe.

I do not recall seeing them (ever) with firefox, though the only way
I can run firefox is on i386...which means ssh to an i386 from AMD64.
So I don't use firefox often.

I *have* seen it, sometimes, with other programs.

I have never found it to consistantly happen.  Usually if a program fails,
I can get it to work by just retrying it.

Correlating to Nathan's comment: My homedirs are on NFS (except when I
ssh to the file server which is the only machine from which I have run
firefox...(^&).

I only have seen this with -current and/or with the AMD64 (I can't
remember when exactly I started seeing it, and don't run -current
much outside of the AMD64 box).


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/