Update:
1.
therube wrote:If all you're wanting to do is to be able to open multiple simultaneous instances of PM, then I think you should be using the -no-remote switch (rather then -new-instance).
Thanks. That's interesting & may have some bearing on scripts (dealing with links under various circumstances) I may do in the future, but it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the present matter.
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palemoon -P profilename --new-instance
works just fine. I've been testing & that isn't the source of any of the problems I've mentioned, or any others that I can see.
2.
I've determined that the mouse problem is definitely caused by my old PM profile. Probably one of the extensions, but I haven't isolated it yet. Whatever it is will bog the mouse (actually trackball) driver down until it is so slow as to be useless, and sometimes it crashes altogether so that the pointer disappears and nothing done with the trackball, including buttons, ball, and wheel has any effect at all. Once it gets to that point it can't be recovered with anything I've tried short of rebooting. Even logging out, and restarting X doesn't do it. It's not just a "hasn't happened to happen yet" thing. I use the old profile, my trackball soon quits working correctly. The new profile, no problem.
3.
Multiple htop lines, the actual title subject, appears to be a red herring. My fresh profile works fine & doesn't cause any trackball problems, but it also causes a plethora of palemoon lines in htop. I've used it long enough now to be totally confident in those assertions.
I haven't found an easy way to quantify this, short of stretching out the window repeatedly and then counting the lines. As I stated in the OP
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ps --wweo | grep palemoon |grep -v grep
doesn't show any problem, so I'm not sure what to make of that. It may have to do with "threads" rather than processes which is a subject I haven't studied.
Whatever it is, since it doesn't seem to be related to the trackball problem, figuring it out is now a lower priority for me than tracking down what extension or setting in my old profile kills my trackball. I may figure that out by restoring the same extensions and settings, a few at a time, until I break this profile the same way. Or not. At any rate, the present profile, which I back up every time I change anything, works.
After I track down the trackball killer, or give up on it, I may return to figuring out the odd htop report and the difference between what htop and ps show. I might even try the profile manager again. But for now those are more matters of curiosity than a practical issues.