Description of problem:

Clicking on a web browser icon is causing some annoying animation of
a rectangular outline and nothing else.  Trying from a terminal window
a line from the icon properties, i.e. 'htmlview %u' or just 'htmlview'
does not show much else either.  'sh -x /usr/bin/htmlview' prints eventually
on a screen 'exec mozilla' and quietly exits after a while similarly to
running just 'htmlview <whatever>' (not very surprising).

An attempt to "strace", while collecting strace output in a file, has
somewhat different effects.  Something like that is printed on a screen:

Process 1432 attached
Process 1431 suspended
PANIC: attached pid 1432 exited

and the whole thing blocks indefinitely after this line

1432  SYS_252(0, 0x1, 0, 0x421248e4, 0

Yes, I know that the above claims that pid 1432 exited but 'ps' has definitely
different opinion:

root      1166  0.0  0.3  4440 1320 pts/0    S    13:12   0:00  \_ bash
root      1430  0.0  0.1  1508  576 pts/0    S    13:25   0:00      \_ strace -f
-o /tmp/mozstart.3 mozilla
root      1431  0.0  0.2  4056 1012 pts/0    T    13:25   0:00      |   \_
/bin/sh /usr/bin/mozilla
root      1432  0.0  0.0     0    0 pts/0    Z    13:25   0:00      |       \_
[basename <defunct>]
root      1437  0.0  0.1  2572  708 pts/0    R    13:26   0:00      \_ ps uwwaxf

Now only 'kill -9' will allow to terminate that.

The whole 'strace' output is attached.