337296 - FF 1.5+ GDI.EXE GPF general protection fault at 0014:000007b6

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[kjm1]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3

The following error happens frequently when doing searches, e.g. Google or searches within amazon.com and other places.  Error can be re-created consistly in about:config as detailed below.  No other software displays any problem, only Firefox.  My configuration:

Windows 98 SE (build 4.10.2222)
512M memory
Firefox 1.5.0.3
NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro video card
NVIDIA Display Driver for Windows 9x version 4.14.10.7184, 02/24/2005
 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. go to about:config
2. scroll down to near the font.name-list section
3. GPF in GDI.EXE occurs trying to scroll down any farther

Actual Results:  
FIREFOX caused a general protection fault
in module GDI.EXE at 0014:000007b6.
Registers:
EAX=02020004 CS=057f EIP=000007b6 EFLGS=00000246
EBX=00000000 SS=11ff ESP=0000c5d4 EBP=0000c62a
ECX=00000002 DS=19ff ESI=0000062c FS=0000
EDX=00000000 ES=19c6 EDI=00000ca0 GS=0657
Bytes at CS:EIP:
ab 85 c0 0f 84 98 00 89 7e d6 33 d2 8b c2 24 07
Stack dump:
000027b2 00020000 00020657 000000ff 000000d9
000119ff 0008062c 0002062e 00010002 00000001
010f0000 00020c98 0000080e 062c6002 19c60000
00000c9a


Expected Results:  
Normal browsing experience.

Here's what I tried so far:

- Going back to FF 1.5.0.2
- Completely removing FF and all directories, reinstalling FF 1.5.0.3
- Upgrading video driver (was at lower version, now at highest supported)
- Disabling DirectX DirectDraw Acceleration via dxdiag
- Placing copy of GDIPLUS.DLL into Firefox installation directory

None of the above produced any improvement.  The problem seems to go away if I do the following:

- Enter (Windows 98) Display Properties, go to Settings, click on Advanced, go to Performance, knock Hardware Acceleration down 2 notches (so it's at the 2nd click from left).  After that the FF fault in gdi.exe does not occur any more.  However other applications like certain games etc. will not function now with the Hardware Acceleration degraded like this, so not a good permanent solution.

Comment 1

[kjm1]

Also tried a pgm demo called FontAgent to detect any corrupted fonts but it did not detect any problem with fonts.

Comment 2

[kjm1]

Tried: Deleting Win386.swp and letting Win98 re-create, defragmenting drives, disabling hardware acceleration for Direct3D, applying GDI fix Q912919, applying GDI fix WMFPatch11, reducing Win98 Display Properties colors from 32-bit to 16-bit.  None of these have had any effect on problem.

Comment 3

[kjm1]

Uninstalled 1.5.0.3 and re-installed 1.5.0.1 -- still same error.  Captured diagnostics with Win98 Dr.Watson pgm if that would be of use -- I don't know how to interpret it.

Comment 4

[kjm1]

It seems that the problem in about:config in the font.name section is where there are non-Western characters.  If I change every value in the font.name section to "regular" names like Arial, Times New Roman, etc. then I can successfully scroll past that section.  Then the GDI.EXE crash occurs when I get to the firefox network.IDN.blacklist_chars line; if I remove all the values from network.IDN.blacklist_chars then I can scroll past that line also.  

It looks like some problem with Firefox not being able to render non-Western characters.

If I google on "firefox prevent non western character" and then click on Groups, the GDI.EXE fault occurs again at that point.  However this does not happen if I do the same in MSIE.

I have tried turning off network.enableIDN but that has not helped the problem.  Is there some configuration setting in Firefox that I can set to prevent it from displaying or trying to display any non-Western characters?  

Comment 5

[kjm1]

Upgraded to 1.5.0.4 but still having exact same problem.

Comment 6

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Reporter, do you still see this problem with the latest Firefox 2? If not, can you please close this bug as WORKSFORME. Thanks!

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> incomplete - no reponse from reporter