1564535 - Firefox fails after last two updates, fault in sxwmon64.dll

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1553776

(External Software Affecting Firefox :: Other, defect)

Description

[Jeremy Albright]

Attachment: Firefox Event Log.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.100 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Automatic update from 66 -> 67 a couple months ago, and 67 -> 68 today, all 64-bit, on all machines running firefox.

All of the machines on my network encountering this problem are running Windows 10 pro, version 1903, build 18362.116, 64-bit. It may have been a lesser version the first time it occurred.

Actual results:

After the update, firefox will open, and immediately crash. Faulting module name: sxwmon64.dll. I am attaching a screenshot of the event log.

Expected results:

It should have opened successfully. The first time this happened, in May, I uninstalled and reinstalled. After today's (07-09-2019) update to v68, uninstall & reinstall had no effect. I have to tell it to open as administrator, after which it opens successfully, and after that, I am able to open it normally.

Comment 1

[Jeremy Albright]

I've confirmed I can reproduce this issue. I downloaded version 67.0.4, and installed it over top of version 68. Same problem, same fix. I ran version 67.0.4 in a new profile, and then let it do an automatic update to version 68. Same problem, same fix.

No crash reporter. The Firefox window doesn't even appear. I can see the process start in task manager, and then it immediately faults and quits.

Comment 2

[[:philipp]]

sxwmon64.dll seems to be relating to this obscure security software, that's apparently hooking into firefox: https://www.ivanti.com/company/history/lumension-security
you might also want to try and reach out to their support...

Comment 3

[Jeremy Albright]

We don't use Lumension Security

Comment 4

[Jeremy Albright]

However, we do use Vipre. I will turn it off and do some testing. If I can narrow it down to that, then I will talk to their support.

Comment 6

[[:philipp]]

could you test if the experimental firefox build from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553776#c13 (download link:
https://queue.taskcluster.net/v1/task/OzD2EYGkT4e5I6wdLJN7Vw/runs/0/artifacts/public/build/install/sea/target.installer.exe ) is able to launch successfully in your environment?

Comment 7

[(No longer employed by Mozilla) Aaron Klotz]

That build is no longer valid. I'm running another build.

Comment 8

[Michael McNally]

FYI, Lumension security is used by Quest's KACE SMA appliance (https://www.quest.com/kace/). The appliance uses Lumension as the source for security patches for Operating System and applications.
We use the KACE SMA in our environment and I'm experiencing this error this morning. We are also several versions behind in upgrading the KACE SMA. This means that the KACE agent running on my PC is not the latest. I'm running 7.1.62, current version is 9.1.317. So it's also possible that the version of the sxwmon.dll I have is not the latest. The version on my PC shows as 5.1.451.0.

There is also an article detailing how to troubleshoot issues with this file: https://forums.ivanti.com/s/article/Troubleshooting-application-conflicts-with-LES, and https://forums.ivanti.com/s/article/How-to-exclude-specific-applications-from-IDAC-LES-protection.

I'm going to try out the suggestions from ivanti. If I find anything useful I'll report back.

Comment 9

[Michael McNally]

I added a registry entry for Firefox as described in https://forums.ivanti.com/s/article/How-to-exclude-specific-applications-from-IDAC-LES-protection.
This solved the problem for me, no reboot required.

Comment 10

[[:philipp]]

hi michael, firefox 68.0.1 containing a mitigation against this has just been released in case you want to try this as well.

Comment 11

[Michael McNally]

Thanks, that's great to hear. That will be my go to fix if any of our users run into this issue.