In message <20041013213801.GA14914@olib.org>, Richard Rauch writes:
>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...(^&).

Is there a setuid program involved anywhere?  In most NFS configurations,
root wouldn't have privileges over NFS, which means that the program 
couldn't read the proper .Xauthority file.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb