Seeing a wierd behavior with Sarge, Gnome, Thunderbird, Firefox, and to an extent, KDE.

[Andy Peed <erzatzfinn@gmail.com>]

I'm wondering if any of you have seen anything like this, and if so, how you solved it.

On my Linux box, I have installed (amongst other things but I think only
these are relevant):

* Debian stable (Sarge), kernel upgraded to version 2.6.8-16;
* Gnome version 2.8;
* Mozilla-Thunderbird, version 1.0.2 (although the titlebar reads
"Debian Thunderbird"; is it a package specific to Debian?);
* Mozilla-Firefox, version 1.0.4;
* KDE, version 3.3.2, which includes
* Konqueror, version 3.3.2;
* mime-support, version 3.21-8.

Since it's a desktop machine, and I didn't dink around with the default
install, both KDE and Gnome are installed. I initially used KDE, found
some niggling things I didn't like,
and ended up switching to Gnome as my preferred desktop enviornment.

My problem is this: I would like to click on a link in a message I am
reading in Thunderbird and have it opened in a Firefox browser window.
(I'd prefer a new tab in an existing Firefox window, if there is one,
but I'd settle for a new Firefox window.)
However, any link I click on gets opened in Konqueror.

In Gnome, I have specified Firefox as the preferred browser under
Applications->Desktop Preferences->Advanced->Preferred Applications.

In Firefox itself, I have configured it to be the default browser and
verified via the button there that it is, indeed, the default browser. 

In the KDE KControl Panel, under KDE Components->File
Associations->Text->HTML, I have specified Mozilla-Firefox as the
preferred application.

What am I missing?

If, in KControl, I go to
KDE Components->Component Chooser->Web Browser and explicitly
specify 'mozilla-firefox' to be used when opening http and https URLs,
a link
selected in Thunderbird will open in Firefox... BUT in addition to the
desired Firefox window, I get an empty Konqueror window AND a button on
the window selector for an additional Firefox window that never
actually complete manifests itself.

If I edit /etc/mailcap and explicitly copy the mozilla-firefox
invocation for text/html into the User Section, clicking on a link in
Thunderbird will open a Konqueror window with an error dialog which
reads "Could not find the program '%u'". This happens even if I comment
out ALL the invocations of konqueror in /etc/mailcap.

Any ideas or clues would be greatly appreciated...

-- Andy