firefox keeps crashing

[joe at actionline.com]

ls -ld ~joe/.Xauthority ... returned this:
-rw------- 1 joe joe 160 Oct 30 12:55 /home/joe/.Xauthority

So, I tried both 'cat' and 'strings' to examine the contents
and got these results:

$ cat .Xauthority
leno0MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1�=��ԃ���|W:���"C��s40MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1��qi)([H��N���Nleno10MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1��͜@�/r�@T�-


$ strings .Xauthority
leno
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
qi)([H
leno
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1


----------------
Rusty last wrote (in part):
> I did an strace of firefox on my Mint 17 x64 system,
> and I'm going to guess that Joe's pc is running 32bit Mint

> ... it LOOKS like you may be having trouble reading your
> ~joe/.Xauthority file. Look at around line 1206.
> Mine, while having a lot of differences (due to you starting
> in safe mode, and being on a 32-bit), the logs stay pretty
> close up to there, then it gets into a very long EAGAIN loop,
> which finally ends with 'shutdown(6,2)'.
>
> However, it goes a long way after that looking like its sort
> of working (again, hard to tell given that I'm reading logs
> between a 64-bit and 32-bit Mint, and one firefox in normal
> mode and one in safe mode).
> Finally, around line 48,351 it gets VERY different, and I see
> a 'SIGSEGV. It seems to be related to file descriptor 4, which
> seems to perhaps be related to the X display.
>
> So, what does 'ls -ld ~joe/.Xauthority' say?  Mine is about
> 353 bytes. Mode 600, owned by me.  How about yours?