Many thanks to all of you for your help, but I get the eery feeling I'm living in a parallel universe, because none of your pointers work for me.
Seb, please tell me exactly where do you have an option to configure tabbed browsing? In Kcontrol > Accessibility > Keyboard shortcuts, I have looked everywhere and can't find it. In Global shortcuts, I find nothing about tabs, neither do I in Applications shortcuts.
Ctrl-arrow (a very clever and elegant shortcut, BTW) must be a KDE thing, because it does work... but only in Konqueror. Neither Mozilla, Galeon, nor Opera budge.
Ctrl-. and Ctrl-, don't work. Neither do Ctrl-] and Ctrl-[. I've tried in Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla and Opera. And even if they worked I wouldn't use them. Talk about awkard shortcuts! I have a Spanish keyboard: , and . are the same as in the English one (but what about French, Arab, Ukrainian typists?); as for [ and ] they are only reachable with AltGr.
Since I disabled the default Ctrl-Tab to cycle through desktops, I can use it to cycle through tabs but only in Opera. I also disabled the default Ctrl-F4 (go to desktop4), but I can't get it to close tabs and am stuck with Ctrl-W which I hate since I used that shortcut for other matters.
Is there a way to get it right through the command line tweaking some config file? Or should I drop KDE altogether?
Thanks for your help and patience.
Urraca [KDE 3.1 Mandrake 9.2]