Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> I received an advertisement message from amazon.com.  It gets rendered
> by w3 but at least one of the links that appears will crash the entire
> session when clicked.  What the heck is going with this?
> 
> The full raw message is posted at:
> http://www.ptw.com/~reader/exp/html_message1
> 
> When viewed with w3 in gnus a link titled
>  Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0 CD-ROM
> 
> will crash the whole shebang here.

Hi,

It is not exactly answer to your question but maybe it can
help to forget all yours w3 problems. There is another browser that 
work with emacs - emacs-w3m.  Emacs-w3m is interface to w3m - simple 
text WWW browser. It still lacks some capabilities of w3m (no frames,
forms support is very primitive), but as simple text browser it does 
very good job. I use w3m-region instead of w3-region to render html
mails in gnus and don't recall any problem with it.

http://namazu.org/~tsuchiya/emacs-w3m/

It is Japanese only page but you can find there links 
to stable and cvs versions.

Attached screenshot of your problematic message in emacs-w3m.
All links works properly.