252914 - Firefox crashes upon startup in Windows XP SP2 due to DEP feature

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 233765

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Zach Kantola]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.9.2

Firefox does not start in Windows XP SP2 because the Data Execution Prevention 
feature prevents components from loading. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Make sure Windows XP SP2 has Hardware DEP enabled.
2.Start Firefox or Thunderbird
3.

Actual Results:  
Netscape Quality Feedback agent opens and a report is able to be sent from 
there.

Expected Results:  
It should have loaded into Firefox.

There's an easy workaround, you can set Firefox and Thunderbird as exceptions 
to programs that DEP blocks under the System control panel. Go to the Advanced 
Tab and click the "Advanced" button under the Performance menu. Click the Data 
Execution Prevention tab, click the add button and find Firefox and 
Thunderbird.

Comment 1

[Ryan Polk (Quark)]

Reporter: you are using an Athlon64 chip?  Can anyone else with A64 and the SP2
beta test this out to confirm?

Doing some research on this, if I am correct, then:
1st) DEP is  WinXP SP2, WinXP-64bit SP1, or Win2003 SP1 dependent.
2nd) It's Athlon64 or Itanium dependent at this time (Intel support coming).

So this is probably a low-visibility issue for now, but Firefox (Mozilla also?)
should be made compatible with DEP in the future.  It looks like any code that's
placed with malloc or HeapAlloc instead needs to be placed with PAGE_EXECUTE
commands.

Info from MSDN on DEP and how it changes memory management:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/memory/base/data_execution_prevention.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/securityinxpsp2.asp

Comment 2

[Ryan Polk (Quark)]

Additional note: I'm not downloading a beta of an SP, but once it goes final I
can test some more because I have an Athlon64 chip.

Comment 3

[Zach Kantola]

Yes, the architecture in question is Athlon 64. I believe that only the new 64-
bit processors have the protected data area, but I am not completely sure 
about that. Even without the hardware support, Service Pack 2 has software 
Data Execution Prevention which should also prevent the code from running. 
This issue should probably be addressed owing to the fact that SP2 is in 
Release Canididate 2 stage, meaning a full release is not far off.

Comment 4

[Ryan Polk (Quark)]

Aha!  Found meta bug 237202 and sure enough ... 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 233765 ***