"1 yes, everything under ~ should belong to you
2 you ran it as root with sudo icecat"
Thank you. That makes sense.
I think I know what happened. Recently I've been trying alternate ways of
starting a graphical session. From a VT I Usually type:
sudo lightdm
Then when I open gnome-terminal in XFCE I see my regular user name.
Experimenting with the startxfce4 command, in a VT, I typed:
sudo startxfce4
Then, when I opened gnome-terminal, I saw I was logged in as root. But I
probably used icecat before opening gnome-terminal and discovering that I was
logged in as root.
So I concluded I should use startxfce4 as a regular user:
startxfce4
Still, it is not clear to me why that would change my regular user's
configuration files. It should just change root's configuration files. Also,
I'm pretty sure I've experienced this problem before I've experimented with
startxfce4
