Thanks for the idea.
Running `appbrowser` from a x terminal window might show some kind of info.
Running appbrowser from a terminal window revealed immediately that... its not doing it any more. Likewise, the problem is no longer happening when I run appbrowser normally.
Yes, I was using base norestore when I tried it last night - same as I did just now.
I was almost as sleepy last night as I am now, so maybe I just did something dumb.
I'll see if the problem reappears after I clean up and rebuild the tce. (I'll probably go grab the latest versin and recompile it, since this one doesn't know where to find its auxiliary files. And it needs its own icon - for testing, I just grabbed one from another app.)