firestarter shuts down intermittently

[Default User]

Does anyone know how to fix this: 

Firestarter shuts down by itself after a few minutes, although iptables
-L seems to show that the "firewall" is still running.  

This seems to happen after clicking the tiny drop-down list triangle in
front of the words "Active connections" on the "Status" tab of the
Firestarter GUI.  

I would really like to cure this problem, since I think it would be very
helpful to be able to alt-tab to Firestarter at any time, to observe who
specifically is communicating with my computer, in real time.  

Thanks.