browsers choke on Asian chars

[Kevin Coyner <kevin@rustybear.com>]

I've got a strange one here that I can't figure out ...

Galeon, Opera and Mozilla all choke if I go to any websites that use
Asian characters.  By choke I mean freeze up - the browser can't be used
nor can it be killed except by through its PID.  I asked some other
Linux users to check out their browsers on these sites, and their
systems render the pages and don't freeze.  Why is my system locking up?

A few more clues:

I don't have the same lock-up when using links, w3m or dillo.

I'm running Debian 2.4.18 on an i386, using testing.  Galeon is 1.25,
Opera is 6.03 and Mozilla is 1.0.0-0.woody.1.

Only the browsers lock up.  All other functionality in other programs
and windows, including X, remain o.k.

sakura:~$ echo $LANG
C

European websites come up fine.  Only those using something like
Japanese, Chinese or Korea chars.  In the status line of the browser I
can see the msg that states it's "loading site" and then "transferring
data" but then when it tries to paint the window, it freezes.  

At this point I'm not too concerned whether these pages render the chars
correctly or not, I just want it to stop locking up whenever it
encounters an Asian char.

I know that in each of these browsers there are settings for foreign
languages.  I've tried those, and I still get lockups.

I've also used dpkg-reconfigure locales to add in Japanese charsets.
Still no good.

Wondering what to try next ...?  

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Kevin

-- 

Kevin Coyner
mailto: kevin@rustybear.com
GnuPG key: 1024D/8CE11941