what happens if you try starting an app in Konsole?

KDE is 4.8.5. I believe I've traced this issue to Firefox 19.0 conflicting with KDE. Getting conditions to repeat are hard to do, so before taking up more of your time, I will try to work out something systematic to report. Everything seems to just work under LXDE. I note that when Firefox does start it tends to lock up for a while then works. Anyway, before taking up more of anyone's time, let me find some more consistency with my issue. Could be some bad RAM I suppose, but I'll check further.

Thanks,
Jerry