Hello all-

I'm running KDE 3.1.5 on a fresh Knoppix/Sid install on a pretty regular
setup...

...and I've been having a rather odd problem. I've set up my panel to
display icons for programs I use often (eg Firefox and Thunderbird). Most of my
panel icons work fine: rhythmbox, bluefish, vlc, etc. Thunderbird and Firefox,
however, keep doing "weird things." To set the icons up, I ran the KMenu
Editor, added an entry for, eg, Firefox with a link to the executable script the
installer places in a parent "Firefox" directory. When I click on "Properties"
in the panel icon's right-click context menu, it shows that I'm executing
the following command:

Code:
./'/home/toto/progs/firefox/firefox'
This works just fine: I click the icon, surf a bit, and then close my
browser. And here's the weird bit. If I try to start the browser again by clicking
the icon, I get the following error message:

Code:
KDEInit could not launch './'/home/toto/progs/firefox/firefox'':
Could not find './'/home/toto/progs/firefox/firefox'' executable.
What's odd is that I haven't changed anything: the path is still correct,
the script is still executable, no permissions have been altered, etc. If I go
back through the icon's context menu, click "Properties," and re-input the
command (only by browsing to the script, however: manually typing it in has no
effect), clicking on the icon (it fails), adding the "./" at the beginning of the path to the script, and then clicking the icon...the thing works again! WTF? I'm a bit confused here...I can
replicate this error quite consistently, and always with the same weird solution. I
googled for '"KDEInit could not launch"' and '"KDEInit could not launch"
"Could not find" executable' to no avail -- other people have similar problems,
but for pretty different reasons (ie they upgraded and then downgraded their
KDE debs from different sources, etc) and none seem to have the "easy 'n odd"
solution I do.

Any ideas?

Thanks much
toto