[kristianf@localhost ~]$ export MALLOC_CHECK_=1
this environmental variable is your friend when dealing with applications acting up. Personally my OpenOffice.org has constantly locked up with errors such as *** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer: 0xb0d53f08 ***. The answer is in the notes of "man malloc".

Recent versions of Linux libc (later than 5.4.23) and GNU libc (2.x)
include a malloc implementation which is tunable via environment vari-
ables. When MALLOC_CHECK_ is set, a special (less efficient) implemen-
tation is used which is designed to be tolerant against simple errors,
such as double calls of free() with the same argument, or overruns of a
single byte (off-by-one bugs). Not all such errors can be protected
against, however, and memory leaks can result. If MALLOC_CHECK_ is set
to 0, any detected heap corruption is silently ignored; if set to 1, a
diagnostic is printed on stderr; if set to 2, abort() is called immedi-
ately. This can be useful because otherwise a crash may happen much
later, and the true cause for the problem is then very hard to track
down.