Firefox behaving very badly...

[London Geezer]

Hey guys,

Thread title says it all really... The thing has been working mighty fine up until this morning, when it suddenly started being very very slow, occasionally freezing when clicking on links... Looking up the task manager, it sucks 50% CPU time on a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 2GB RAM on XP Pro... Definitely not right...

I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, and still nothing...

I have NO extensions and add-ons installed, just plain Firefox 2...

What's going on? I don't get it...

 

[Zaphod]

Did you clean out the installation and profile directories before reinstalling?

Did you check to see if the Firefox process actually terminates when you 'close' the program?

The most likely cause of Firefox misbehaving is a corrupt user profile, which would survive a reinstall. Add MozBackup to your arsenal and reconfigure from scratch.

 

[London Geezer]

Did you clean out the installation and profile directories before reinstalling?

Did you check to see if the Firefox process actually terminates when you 'close' the program?

The most likely cause of Firefox misbehaving is a corrupt user profile, which would survive a reinstall. Add MozBackup to your arsenal and reconfigure from scratch.

I uninstalled FF before reinstalling it, wouldn't that clean up what needs to be cleaned up? If not, how do i do it?

Thanks!!

(By the way, as i have been foced to use IE7 now because of this, i have to say that i'm quite impressed, it's a million times than IE6 or before... still, i want my FF back!!)

 

[London Geezer]

Found how to do it... THANKS!! it's all fixed now..

 

[Rys]

I uninstalled FF before reinstalling it, wouldn't that clean up what needs to be cleaned up? If not, how do i do it?

Thanks!!

(By the way, as i have been foced to use IE7 now because of this, i have to say that i'm quite impressed, it's a million times than IE6 or before... still, i want my FF back!!)

The uninstaller might keep your old profile around (it's usually in Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles).

As for managing profiles, look no further than Mozilla.org itself.

 

[Zaphod]

I uninstalled FF before reinstalling it, wouldn't that clean up what needs to be cleaned up? If not, how do i do it?

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile

Edit: Never mind. I’m both too slow, and you sorted it by yourself . Glad you fixed it. I could have elaborated more, so sorry about that.

And no, the Firefox installer doesn’t always 'fix' everything. It deliberately stays away from messing with anything it didn’t install itself, which in many ways is a good thing. I haven’t checked lately but previously it wasn’t able to kill a stuck Firefox process either. It was always recomended to start entirely from scratch back in the day, and I don't think they 'officially' supported upgrading over an old install before 2.0.

 

[davepermen]

This is something that scares me. Firefox is the only thing I've seen yet, that freezes, and it's not possible then to kill the process then from task manager, or process explorer. Anyone know how to kill that thread then? I can't even reboot the system then, because it waits for the process to quit, which it doesn't.

Quite disturbing. That shouldn't ever be possible. I mean, Firefox can f**k up how ever it wants. It should still be killable in a task manager.

 

[karlotta]

This is something that scares me. Firefox is the only thing I've seen yet, that freezes, and it's not possible then to kill the process then from task manager, or process explorer. Anyone know how to kill that thread then? I can't even reboot the system then, because it waits for the process to quit, which it doesn't.

Quite disturbing. That shouldn't ever be possible. I mean, Firefox can f**k up how ever it wants. It should still be killable in a task manager.

never not be able to kill it in the task manager. Sometime java with FF on left open pages/tab can bring in the ram pigs..

 

[Blazkowicz]

This is something that scares me. Firefox is the only thing I've seen yet, that freezes, and it's not possible then to kill the process then from task manager, or process explorer. Anyone know how to kill that thread then? I can't even reboot the system then, because it waits for the process to quit, which it doesn't.

Quite disturbing. That shouldn't ever be possible. I mean, Firefox can f**k up how ever it wants. It should still be killable in a task manager.

does a taskkill /f /im firefox.exe work?