405724 - Application loses last used local directory, defaulting to My Documents

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Franzeska Dipswitch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071115 Firefox/2.0.0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071115 Firefox/2.0.0.10

Reading a digital newspaper I daily load lots of pdf and jpg documents, in sizes from 10 kB to 1 Mb. The pdfs are handled by the latest Adobe plugin and the jpgs by FireFox itself. I save a lot of these files to my local hard disk C:. FireFox tends to remember the directory used last, but regularly loses this path and defaults to My Documents. This is extremely cumbersome, costs me lots of time and hurts my poor battered arms.
I don't know whether the cause is with FireFox or the Adobe Reader plugin.
Sometimes FireFox keeps track of what I see as my "Session Working Directory" for dozens of files at a row, then again it loses the path after every three or five saves. Restarting the application does not help. Neither does restarting the machine.
The machine is a Dell desktop with 1 GB internal memory. Windows XP shows no signs of stress, the max memory never gets used (I monitor it permanently with Process Explorer). The OS is healthy, fast and bug free and regularly gets the official MS updates. The problem never occurs with any other apllication.
The loss of the path seems most frequent when I change between the file types pdf and jpg, but otherwise I see no pattern.
A splendid option would be a field in the setup panel to specify a Working Directory that can be adjusted as needed.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.go to www.nrc.nl
2.choose the digital newspaper (a small rectangle showing a newspaper image, under a caption "Digitale editie", at the right, near the top)
3.choose "print versie (pdf)" at the drop down box upper right
4.start reading and saving files, switching to jpg now and then, and you can't miss (on my machine, at least).
The digital edition is temporarily free of charge, but if prompted for a password, you can use user=haslo and pw=k5pjxxe6 (please keep this confidential).
Actual Results:  
Saving files, the application loses track of the directory last used. This occurs  after an unpredictable number of saves, but it never fails to happen.

Expected Results:  
Application should always keep track of directory last used.

Well... I believe this is it.

Comment 1

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

It would be interesting to know if this happens on current Firefox 3 nightlies as well as getting some sense of how often.

Comment 2

[aravindm]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007091904 Minefield/3.0a8pre
Unable to login to the website. Wrong username and password.