280151 - browser fails to respond to any action, profile is corrupted

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[NS]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

I have come across this bug a few times.

Randomly (not sure which causes this to occur), after a browser is started,
browser fails to respond to any actions. Can not type in browser link, can not
click any of the dropdown menus.
To fix this problem, have to manually edit the profiles.ini and remove the
default profile setting and choose a different profile.

But the issue is that I can not import my bookmarks, plugins and other settings
from my previous profile.

This problem has occured atleast five times so far.



Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start browser
2. Customize bookmarks, set password manager, add passwords
3. install some extensions such as fireFTP

Actual Results:  
Use browser for a while. Suddenly the browser after startup fails to respond to
any mouse clicks. Can not enter URL in the bar.

Expected Results:  
Normal browser behavior

Possible acceptable alternatives: Easy import of data from one profile to
another profile and it should prompt for password to import from password manager.

Comment 1

[Mihai Dragan]

I can confirm this bug. Same thing happened to one of my friends on WinXP after
an update to firefox 1.0.3 (don't know if it has anything to do with the
update). I have done what n_seshadri said, removed the default profile setting.
After that it worked again, and i started to copy files from the old profile to
the new one. When I copied prefs.js to the new profile, that's when it didn't
work again. So I removed prefs.js, and it worked well with the generated
default. Unfortunately I don't have the bad prefs.js anymore.

Comment 2

[Aaron Thoma]

Attachment: An unfixed prefs.js - problem not (well) reproducible

[This text is also comment #2]

I just had massive problems, like the ones you describe. Not even -safe-mode
worked.
Funnily, I could work, but I just didn't get any feedback in the window. One
thing responding was the title bar.

For example, I entered something in the search bar and nothing moved *in* the
window, but I saw in the title bar, that it worked. Also, closing/changing tabs
"worked". So probably some chrome problem.
One example more: I can click the update circle and perform an update (the
update window is drawed correctly).

Unfortunately, it does not seem easily reproducible: now it works again
perfectly, though I did not do something different. I played around a lot, but
changed everything back.

Last time I had it, I think I got it fixed, by restarting Firefox a lot, and
when I was lucky and didn't have the bug, I deactivated all the extensions but
the ones I really needed.
But now, this does not seem to be the point, as it already occurs in safe mode.

Comment 3

[Aaron Thoma]

Maybe this is a duplicate of bug #304168

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

is problem gone?

Comment 5

[Aaron Thoma]

Yup, I guess - I haven't seen the problem for a long time now; I don't remember since which version. But surely not in FF 3.

Comment 6

[Mihai Dragan]

Haven't seen this bug in a long time.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> WFM then. thanks for the feedback