Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
thanks , that was the fix. If the copied conf file is in ~/.gnumed
then it works repeatably,
but if no conf file is present, one is written by the app when it first
runs and works,
but this application written conf file chokes the application on second
running.