firefox menu lag with mouse

Some time in the last few months I started getting a 3-4 second delay when interacting with any of the menus in www/firefox. For example, if I click on Bookmarks it takes 3 seconds to display. If I then scroll down and pause over a directory for too long, the highlighting will freeze until the folder expands and then catch up with the mouse cursor.

Another good example is when a dialog pops up like the master password. If I right click to paste, the delay happens. However, if I just ctrl-v the paste happens instantly.

It only happens in the native firefox, not the linux version or even the win32 via wine. And no other X apps, KDE4 or otherwise, display any lag.

Things I've tried already:

  • Moving ~/.mozilla and starting fresh
  • Rebuilding firefox and all dependencies
  • Rebuilding all ports
  • Moving ~/.kde* config files and starting fresh
  • Updating to the lastest 8-STABLE

Does anyone have any ideas of what else to try? Besides the lag it really works best out of all of the versions but I almost can't stand it any longer.
 
My firefox becomes very slow after visiting some sites with Flash. I solved this by killing npviewer.bin processes. If you search this forum, you can find a shell script to do this job.
 
Yeah, I'm aware of the npviewer.bin zombies. This happens however as soon as I start firefox at the master password dialog for instance.
 
I remember an issue with FF syncing to disk every 10 (?) seconds or something like that, and taking very long every time. This could be circumvented using the config editor. Maybe someone remembers which thread this is in, or a crafty search may yield results. If you do not see disk activity when the lags occur this is probably not relevant.
 
It's not very precise but I watched gstat output while messing around with menus and didn't really see anything abnormal.

Here's a video of what's happening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTfoQkJqFz0. I took this with a new user account that didn't have anything pre-configured. Does native Firefox maybe have a dependency on hald that the linux/wine versions wouldn't? The only other time I've seen remotely similar behavior is when I let hald configure my input devices. I would get the same type of delays on any app, including just typing in something like Konsole. So I don't allow it to configure my mouse/keyboard in xorg.conf. That's the only other commonality between the accounts I can think of.
 
After months and months of this lag I finally figured it out. Under system settings in KDE there's a settings tab that shows which scripts are auto-started. There was only one: ~/.kde4/env/gtk-qt-engine.rc.sh which simply pulls ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4 into the environment. I deleted this, restarted, and the menus in Firefox are back to normal. I also noticed that my systray icons look different and some desktop effects have changed.

 
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