Cuddles
I think I have it.
I was able to reproduce your situation on my PC.

You should have a file called /etc/resolv.conf

Check the output of ls -l /etc/resolv.conf
It should look something like this.
Code:
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           87 Dec 24 11:50 /etc/resolv.conf
The bits we are interested in are the sequence of dashes, r's and w's at the front.

If yours does NOT look like the one above (I suspect yours will be something like -rw-------) then do a chmod 644 /etc/resolv.conf to change it. Of course you will need to logged in as root to change it.

Once you have it looking like the one above, then try konqueror/mozilla again as a non-root user. You should probably make sure that you exit and restart konqueror/mozilla after changing the file.

Re: firestarter, I can't really help you here. I have never used it myself.