370744 - System crash on Firefox startup

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Will Martin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1

Okay, here's the problem: sometimes, when I start Firefox, my system crashes.  Hard.  I double click the Firefox icon on my desktop, and the next moment I'm watching the BIOS run.  It doesn't happen reliably; I'd say the crashes occur about 1 time in 5 startups.

It's happened when I have other programs running, but it's also happened with nothing else going.  I've never observed the crashes to happen twice in a row, but I've noticed that Firefox never runs "Restore Session" after one has happened, which suggests that the crash is happening before a new session is created.

This one's going to be a pain to diagnose, because there's no error data.  Is there some way I can set Firefox to log its startup process somehow?  If there's some way I can generate more useful debug data, please tell me so!  So far, I haven't lost any data this way.  But it's sure to happen if this keeps happening.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
Unclear how to reproduce.  Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't, and there's no obvious pattern.



System data:
I'm running XP service pack 2.  I don't have IE 7 installed.  As far as I know, both Windows and all my software is up to date.

Here's a list of all processes running immediately after Windows has finished loading and before I've started anything of my own:
<pre>
Process	PID	CPU	Description	Company Name
System Idle Process	0	98.44		
 Interrupts	n/a		Hardware Interrupts	
 DPCs	n/a		Deferred Procedure Calls	
 System	4			
  smss.exe	592		Windows NT Session Manager	Microsoft Corporation
   csrss.exe	652	1.56	Client Server Runtime Process	Microsoft Corporation
   winlogon.exe	676		Windows NT Logon Application	Microsoft Corporation
    services.exe	724		Services and Controller app	Microsoft Corporation
     svchost.exe	884		Generic Host Process for Win32 Services	Microsoft Corporation
     svchost.exe	964		Generic Host Process for Win32 Services	Microsoft Corporation
     svchost.exe	1000		Generic Host Process for Win32 Services	Microsoft Corporation
     svchost.exe	1048		Generic Host Process for Win32 Services	Microsoft Corporation
     svchost.exe	1124		Generic Host Process for Win32 Services	Microsoft Corporation
     vsmon.exe	1136		TrueVector Service	Zone Labs, LLC
     spoolsv.exe	1548		Spooler SubSystem App	Microsoft Corporation
     mysqld-nt.exe	1192			
     nvsvc32.exe	2028		NVIDIA Driver Helper Service, Version 93.71	NVIDIA Corporation
     wdfmgr.exe	240		Windows User Mode Driver Manager	Microsoft Corporation
     svchost.exe	2060		Generic Host Process for Win32 Services	Microsoft Corporation
    lsass.exe	736		LSA Shell (Export Version)	Microsoft Corporation
explorer.exe	1820		Windows Explorer	Microsoft Corporation
 zlclient.exe	1948		ZoneAlarm Client	Zone Labs, LLC
 acrotray.exe	200		AcroTray	Adobe Systems Inc.
 procexp.exe	320		Sysinternals Process Explorer	Sysinternals
</pre>

Acrotray only runs because I haven't figured out how to stop it from running.

I'm using an unusual partitioning scheme:

hda:
C: NTFS (25.3 GB)
D: FAT32 (49.1 GB)
hdb:
G: FAT32 (19.1 GB)
Two ext3 partitions and a swap partition for Linux on this drive

XP always runs consistency checks on D: after a crash, but never on G:.  Probably this is because G: is completely empty at the moment.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Firefox can't crash windows XP because Firefox is a user space application.
Firefox only triggers a bug in one of your kernel mode drivers.
It's makes also no difference if you get this crashes only with firefox, it's still a bug in one of your kernel mode drivers.

You can disable the automatic reboot of windows in the windows system control
(system control(system/advanced) and you may get more informations in the Windows Blue Screen (the name of the .dll if you are lucky).

I many cases the problem is the graphic card driver.

marking invalid (because this is no Firefox bug)