357511 - Firefox and Thunderbird will not start if run from an XP profile named with Unicode

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Joren]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Firefox does not run from a Windows XP user profile which has a Unicode name.  When launched, firefox briefly appears on the Task Manager and then quits without displaying anything; no talkback, no error, no "import" wizard for the new profile.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Create a new Windows XP Profile with Unicode characters (mine used Japanese katakana without any regular ASCII)
2.  Log in to this profile
3.  Try running Firefox
Actual Results:  
Nothing happens - program never loads, quits without Talkback, error message or anything.  Firefox.exe briefly executes and then exits after having displayed nothing.

Expected Results:  
Um...firefox should have loaded and run :)

Originally happened on 1.5.7, tried complete uninstall and went to the nightly build to see if it would resolve.  Did not.

The Unicode characters I used for the test were Japanese katakana and kanji.

Also, running Firefox from the commmand line does not work; neither does firefox -ProfileManager or anything else I can think of.

Comment 1

[Joren]

Oh, I'm sorry... forgot to be more specific:  I'm running a PC with Windows XP Media Center Service Pack 2.

Comment 2

[Jungshik Shin]

bug 202366 is similar. As far as I remember, the cause of this problem has to do with either component registry code or profile handling code still using 'native' nsIFile methods on Windows. Earlier this year, I identified the code in question (and may even have filed a bug on it), but my 20-seconds search didn't bring it up. 

Comment 3

[Zvika Ben-Haim]

This happened to me too when using a username with Hebrew characters. Very annoying!

Comment 4

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

Confirming based on comments.

Comment 5

[utf16]

This probably applies to every Mozilla application, since they are very codepage dependent. Thunderbird doesn't launch from a user profile named in Unicode characters as well.

As Firefox still can run in a profile that uses characters from the default codepage, for testing purposes it is necessary to create an account with the name like "гестゲスト".

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

do you find this fixed in ?? ...

TB3 recent nightly (via bug 470392)
  ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/
 (not yet in http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/)   
FF3.1 nightly (via bug 305039)
  ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-1.9.1/

backup you profile first

Comment 7

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

See also bug 396052, and another bug that I can't find where Firefox crashes on startup in this situation because NSS can't take a Unicode pathname, so we fail to init NSS and then crash.

Comment 8

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

bug 440766 was the other bug. Should probably just dupe forward. We fixed a bunch of other bugs in this case, such that when this bug was reported, I'm quite sure that neither Firefox nor Thunderbird would start at all. Now it's at a point where it will start, but NSS will not work (and Firefox crashes as a result).

Comment 9

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

In the process of migrating remaining bugs to the new severity system, the severity for this bug cannot be automatically determined. Please retriage this bug using the new severity system.

Comment 10

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mossop, could you have a look please?

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