with nvidia fully uninstalled? (even no libs being present?)
Yes.
However the rest of the desktop works just fine while the new Konqueror
window is unresponsive. I can for instance still write this email inside
my mail program.
Humor me for a minute. If it were not a graphics card driver issue, how
would I figure out what Konqueror is trying to do for that select()
call? What service is behind file descriptor 7?