245441 - ff refuses to start on a restricted user-account

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Zahno]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040527 Firefox/0.8.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040531 Firefox/0.8.0+

installation as administrator is OK. if started on another account (without
admin privileges) ff refuses to start.
20040531 seems to endless restart firefox process (couldn't even kill the process)
20040601 seems to endless restart firefox process (couldn't even kill the process)
20040602 just refuses to start.

After the first start on the restricted account, an incomplete profilefolder can
be found, if I copy the content from the admin-profilefolder to the users
profilefolder, ff can be started as restricted user.

Restricted user means: User is not in the "Power Users" or "Administrators" Group.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a new Windows User
2. Remove User from Groups "Poweruser" or "Administrators"
3. Clean install ff (installer- or zip-build) as admin
4. Switch to the created user (or logout admin and logon new user)
5. try to start ff

Actual Results:  
ff refuses to start, or ff (firefox.exe) is restarting endless without ever
showing up.
In both cases ff tries to create the profilefolder and the new profile, but the
profile seems to be incomplete.

Expected Results:  
create a new profile and fire up :-)

I tested this behaviour on two different computers:

First Computer: P4, 1GB RAM, Dualhead (ATI)
Second Computer: P4, 1GB RAM, Dualhead (Matrox)

I used a clean install (removed old profiles) without any plugins or extensions.

Comment 1

[Martin Alderson]

I have installed it on a limited user accournt on WinXP and ran it from there,
so it does work on a limited user account (this is plain 0.8).

However, I haven't tried instlaling it on an admin account and running it on a
limited account but I'm sure we would hear a lot more about it if this is true.

Comment 2

[Mike Zahno]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I have installed it on a limited user accournt on WinXP and ran it from there,
> so it does work on a limited user account (this is plain 0.8).

I use Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040527
Firefox/0.8.0+ and this one works without problems in my (restricted) environment.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Just so I'm clear on this bug: are we talking about the current branch builds?

Comment 4

[Mike Zahno]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Just so I'm clear on this bug: are we talking about the current branch builds?

Yes. But i didn't checked it with the trunk-builds.

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I can reproduce on linux.

Ben, this is failing in the extension manager at _writeProfileFile { fos.init()
} (which is not actually for just profile files, because it writes the
installdir manifest also). I'm not sure where the exception should be caught,
though or what the error-handling should be.

Comment 6

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Fix checked in. (bug is only on branch)

Comment 7

[Martin Koch]

*** Bug 245555 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Simon Bowden]

I think I'm seeing this problem with Firefox 0.9 release.
Simple to reproduce:

Install firefox, then delete/rename the "extensions" directory at the base level
of the install location.

Then running firefox as an unprivileged user fails.
This directory is only created when the installer initially launches firefox as
the user that had write access to the install location. Thus if this initial
launch is not done (e.g. compile from cvs, not using installer), then the
extensions directory isn't created, and firefox doesn't work as an unprivileged
user.

I was previously associating my issue with Bug 246806, but perhaps its slightly
different.