Massive breakage after latest apt-get upgrade?

[Stephen R Laniel]

I apt-get upgraded earlier this afternoon, then left. Now I
come back, and

1) When I try to run firefox, I get a segfault immediately.
2) I'm getting 'bash: fork: Resource temporarily
unavailable' errors all over the place -- even when doing
innocuous things like 'ls'. The inability to run ls is a bit
of a crimp in my style.
3) I can run konqueror, but when I try to visit a web page
within it I get 

'An error occurred while loading http://google.com/:
Could not start process Cannot talk to klauncher.'

Looks like something serious broke. Maybe libc somewhere?
Any suggestions?

I'm not even sure this message will be able to send. Let's
see.

...Well, it didn't send; mutt tried to fork a subprocess to
send the message, and failed. I rebooted, and on a lark I
removed beagled and best from the list of programs that
start when my session starts, before GNOME started. I had
been running beagled and best fine before, but I don't
believe I had started them from the GNOME sessions list. I
wonder whether there's any problem resulting from starting
them too early?

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key