Thanks for the instrucitons, Seb!
I tried GDB. Strangely enough, with amarok running under GDB, the "current" menu miraculously begins to display proper info for the first played track (but never changes when the next track is selected/played)! When I start amarok (or amarokapp) outside of the gdb environment, the problem recurs again.
Instead of generating a backtrace, I started amarok from konsole. This gives me the following message as soon as the "current" malfunctions (i.e. as soon as I select it):
"[New Thread -229389392 (LWP 4500)]
Very strange! got a DCOPReply opcode, but we were not waiting for a reply!"
If this does not help, I'll attach a backtrace generated at this point precisely (w/o amarok crashing, cause it doesn't anymore).
thanks again!
rado
(edited for spelling and grammar)