program launcher going wild

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings all;

For the 2nd time I am going to have to reboot.

If I have a copy of firefox running, a click on an html link in an email 
will hand the request off to firefox just fine.

But if firefox is not running, then whatever is in charge of handling such 
link clicks tries to start at leasy 100 copies of konqueror, so I wind up 
with a machine whose lower info bar has buttons from processes trying to 
run lined up to as little as 1/8" wide, which it will do for 2-3 minutes 
and then it will try to kill them all, which it will do for perhaps 5 
seconds, but will eventually start fireing of another 100 or so copies, 
none of which ever actually open a screen.

as root, killall konqueror, or killall neopmukservices is powerless to stop 
it.

htop shows the cpu on a quad core phenom being pushed to as high as 90% on 
all 4 cores, but the only way to stop it is to close down kmail cleanly and 
reboot.  Then spend 20 minutes getting all the other stuff I run here 
started again.

I can run konqueror from a shell, which gets a bunch of mewling about stuff 
in the shell I start it from, looks like this:

kbuildsycoca4 running...
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/freecad.desktop" is not compliant with XDG 
standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry MimeType in 
"/usr/share/applications/freecad.desktop" is not compliant with XDG 
standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/fmit.desktop" is not compliant with XDG 
standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/avidemux-gtk.desktop" is not compliant with XDG 
standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry MimeType in 
"/usr/share/applications/avidemux-gtk.desktop" is not compliant with XDG 
standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/projectx.desktop" is not compliant with XDG 
standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/gcalctool.desktop" is not compliant with XDG 
standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry MimeType in 
"/usr/share/applications/Kino.desktop" is not compliant with XDG standard 
(missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/antspotlight.desktop" is not 
compliant with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/glschool.desktop" is not compliant 
with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/fuzzyflakes.desktop" is not 
compliant with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/glblur.desktop" is not compliant 
with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/gltext.desktop" is not compliant 
with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/glmatrix.desktop" is not compliant 
with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/glslideshow.desktop" is not 
compliant with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/hypertorus.desktop" is not 
compliant with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/fiberlamp.desktop" is not 
compliant with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 
kbuildsycoca4(1667) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry Categories 
in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers/glcells.desktop" is not compliant 
with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon). 

Which because it complains about the missing semicolon, seems to be just 
the smoke from the fire as I have checked some of those files its 
complaining about, and about half of them do have the trailing semicolon.

Not an impressive or efficient way to run a train, so can anyone tell me 
how to kill this runaway program launcher without killing the system?

Thanks all.

Cheers, Gene
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