I couldn’t, and neither could I with a 10.10 live, so it’s possibly something that’s changed going from 10.04 to 10.10. I also tried Chromium and Firefox 6 under 10.04; with Firefox 6 the issue persists, whereas with Chromium I can’t reproduce it. There’s of course a more serious bug underlying the browser, as no application issue should bring the entire system to its knees.

(I just realized I used amd64 live discs in the tests whereas the installed 10.04 is an x86 system. Perhaps it makes no difference but I’ll leave judging that to experts.)

I’ll gladly execute more tests if anyone has ideas how to narrow this down even more.