Strange new behaviour... multiple symptoms

[John L Novice]

Couple of days ago this started (involves KMail, FF, domain resolution delays)

right clicking on links starts to sometimes open new pages automatically, or show pop up window with link details, sometimes the rotating busy image of pointer before anything happens, couple other oddities I don't remember atm

then what seemed like domain resolution delays: 20 seconds from "go" to start of data transfer, another 20 seconds till any transfer actually starts (DSL connection)

KMail, the read mail in my in-box now appears as un-read ( except for oldest two and newly downloaded and read mail)

Very strange, I wonder what is causing this.

FC9 2.6.27.19
FF 3.07
KMail 1.9.10 (KDE 3.5.10) EDIT: I'm using Gnome with KDE apps
Behind NAT SPI router and Fedora Firewall both at "paranoid" settings
I've got the internet user under SEL context of user-u (I believe, no root priviledges)
no AV

Any ideas as to a cause or what I should be looking into?

[Evil_Bert]

right clicking on links starts to sometimes open new pages automatically, or show pop up window with link details, sometimes the rotating busy image of pointer before anything happens, couple other oddities I don't remember atm

This part of your symptoms may be a common problem. See this thread:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=213659

[John L Novice]

Forgot to add:
FF ext: NoSript 1.9.0.6
Add Block Plus

@ Evil_Bert: sounds like would be part of it

[John L Novice]

What's really got me concerned is KMail, why on earth would my read mail change to unread?
Can somebody suggest how/where I might look into this?
Could it be something/somebody has messed with KMail?

I have previously looked at incoming logs of my router but for some reason it only ever shows me outgoing logs.
I should add that where I live (rent) there are two other units. It's an old house and I DO NOT TRUST the wiring nor the other tennants! (they couldn't be more of a heat score if they used flashing neon lights to advertise their fool behaviour. And I believe the have knowledgable technical help.)
btw I don't engage in any illegal behaviour, no pirating, not anything, I don't even have Flash installed.

[John L Novice]

update: new error

"Error while initializing the sound driver:
device:default can't be opened for playback (connection refused)"
~

[Evil_Bert]

I think the Firefox problems are common and nothing to worry about.

The DNS lookup slowness has happened to me with previous ISPs - a slow DNS server that's even slower in peak times - I could sometimes wait 30 secs for a lookup. You might want to look at bandwidth issues, connection quality and your ISP's/DNS service reliability. Perhaps using OpenDNS for a while would give you something to compare.

As for Kmail - I don't use it and I haven't seen a problem like that before, but it strikes me as something a hacker/cracker wouldn't bother with, so more likely to be a configuration error or similar (maybe you accidentally toggled read/un-read recently?).

Several router models I know don't show incoming traffic, only outgoing connections and firewall block events, so depending on what application you're using to view router data (which I assume is syslog-style data) the fields may be empty not because of tampering but because your router doesn't record that data.

There doesn't seem to be anything to suggest you've been hacked/cracked, IMHO.

[John L Novice]

It's mostly KMail that I'm concerned about. I can't see how I could have made a change, to toggle only six of the eight, (EDIT: two oldest remained unchanged) I would've had to have only them selected, I would think, very strange. Perhaps some kind of bug? I was initially thinking maybe a virus, or possibly the neighbours....again not exactly likely but then you don't know the neighbours...

The others having happened at the same time is what got my back up, if I can put it that way. FF, apparently it's own issue. I'll be trying the OpenDNS servers, There seems to be a lot of issues with my ISP, hrmph. The router, well it's "onboard" logging, also have to look into that too.

I don't really know what to make of it.