Start by updating to SL 6.4, which includes significant firefox updates.

Is your home directory NFS mounted, or is it on your local system? And
did you perchance set "/tmp" to be a separate partition, or one of
those "virtual" filesystems?

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Steve Talbott
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Greetings, all —
>
>    SL6.2; kernel 2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.i686
>    Gnome: 2.28.2
>    Firefox: 17.0.10
>    Evince: 2.28.2
>
> Trying to save a webpage from firefox or a pdf file from evince results in
> error messages (given below) saying I don’t have permission to create the
> files.  This happens whether it is evince trying to create temporary files
> in /tmp or firefox trying to create files in my personal file system.
> There are no problems with the permissions on /tmp ("drwxrwxrwt") or my
> own file system, and the messages always apply only to creation of files
> within subdirectories that the application creates.  Firefox creates a
> subdirectory, owned by my uid/gid, with "drw-r--r--" permissions.  Evince
> creates a subdirectory owned by my uid/gid with "drw-------" permissions.
> For what it’s worth, my umask is 0002.
>
> So these applications are creating directories without execute permission,
> and then complaining about the lack of permission.  The Adobe pdf reader
> (acroread) saves files with no problem, and I have no difficulty creating
> directories with mkdir or files with vi — no problems with permissions in
> general.
>
> Error messages:
>
> From firefox (when saving to the /home/stevet/Download directory):
>
>    /home/stevet/Download/search_files/rsAltRSTNEofta[etc].js
>    could not be saved, because you cannot change the contents of that
>    folder.  Change the folder properties and try again, or try saving in a
>    different location.  [message generally repeated many times, once for
>    each file in the <pagename>_files subdirectory of my Download
>    directory.]
>
> From evince (when saving to /home/stevet):
>
>    Failed to create file "/tmp/evince-9460/saveacopy-3.U5SL8W": Permission
>    denied
>
> The problem with firefox has gone on for the better part of a year; evince
> started having the same problem only very recently.  My efforts to search
> out a solution, whether from online information or through my own
> experimentation, have yielded nothing.  Would appreciate any suggestions.
> Thanks!
>
> Steve
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Stephen L. Talbott                               BiologyWorthyofLife.org
> Senior Researcher, The Nature Institute:             natureinstitute.org
> Mailing address: 20 May Hill Road, Ghent NY 12075      Tel: 518-672-5049