You were right on target (.kde folder corruption). Your suggestion got me back
into KDE quite painlessly. I'll have to remember it for future use!

This particular crash, on that website, is very repeatable. I had experienced
it several times under 9.10/Gnome/Firefox, and was curious to see if it would
happen under 9.10/KDE/Firefox.

But I definitely have something else going on. I have experienced other freezes
under 9.10/Gnome - quite random, and not repeatable. My main purpose in
installing KDE is to determine if those freezes correlate to the Gnome
environment. (I've seen them described in 9.10 forums, and on the Mozilla
Firefox forum. I don't believe it's a Firefox problem.) So far, I haven't seen
the "random" freeze in 9.10/KDE/Firefox, but it's too soon to tell.

I don't think it's any kind of hardware problem, though. I still have 8.04 on
another partition, and it's rock-solid. So far, the random freezes correlate
with 9.10/Gnome/Firefox.