Thanks guys, and sorry I've taken so long to reply. I've been busy with the mess --- had to reconstruct passwords for everything, mail accounts, websites, even this forum as well recover bookmarks, etc, etc.
Result I've backed off of 2.53.6 and reconstructed my profile for 2.49.4, so things are finally back to working well before I "fixed" things by "upgrading" Seamonkey. I don't know why I did that. I should have known better. It was a dumb whim. I don't actually "need" a later version. I don't normally kneejerk upgrade Seamonkey, because this is typical of what can happen to a profile if you do, because they tend to make radical engine changes sometimes. Just a momentary lapse in judgement when I got some site saying the browser was outdated. Usually you can just click past that and things still work fine. Lesson learned......again.
But not to leave people who tried to help hanging, sorry:
In answer to ThruHammer it's PAE.
In answer to amethyst, Sorry I'm not sure what version of GTK is installed.
mikewalsh, thanks for thinking about trying to duplicate. I presently have Tahrpup 6.0.5 according to Pup-Sysinfo, Tahrfix-8 installed. I didn't realize there was a 6.0.6 version. I'll have to look into that. ......or maybe I shouldn't!
bigpup, thanks for listing the latest dependencies. Rather surprised the program didn't complain it needed dependencies instead of crashing silently only on certain web pages. Usually if a program needs something it won't start at all, and you can read what's up in console. But agreed it's not worth tracking it down for me, I'll just stick with tried and true 2.49.4 for now until I eventually migrate from Tahrpup to BP64.
Palemoon folks.....I've tried Palemoon before. It's okay, but I have been using Seamonkey ever since I got into Puppy 13 years ago, I know it backwards and forwards with favorite settings, add-ons and even about:config choices, and I like the integrated mail, and basically using the standard browser on a standard puppy. Just makes things easier for me. I just hope they don't try to now make it look and act like Firefox, dumbing down the user choices because then I will truly have to look for something more amenable to user control.
Anyway, OT, thank you all for trying to help.