balsa refuses to launch acrobat or any other program

I use Suse 8.1. I had to recompile the packaged balsa, because it is unable to send email. But my compiled version is unable to launch any application, like acrobat or xpdf to see an attached file.pdf on an email, it freezes. This behavior happens in both balsa-1.4.2 and 2.0.6 (the later is for gtk2). I don't remember if it happened with the suse packaged version, 1.2.4. Any idea why this could be? -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson