437935 - "Firefox is already running,..." but I can't delete parent.lock to remedy the problem.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Matthew]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

I will use Firefox, then close it (this is known for sure), shut down my computer, and in the morning, it will not start giving me the above answer.  I used to have this problem under Firefox 2 and Windows XP, and I could find a "firefox.exe" in Task Manager that was still running and close it to get back it to start again, though this did not ever occur the first time I ever tried to run it after a fresh Boot.  So here we obviously have a different problem, with Vista or Firefox 3 or both, and I found the online articles about the "parent.lock" file.  So I found it, and upon trying to delete it, it would not let me, not because of "Read Only" or "Corrupt or Unreadable" as your Knowledgebase stated could be the culprit, but because "the file is in use by another program."  And this is the very first run after a fresh build, with no sight of anything Mozilla or Firefox related in the Task Manager, and I don't use any other Mozilla products but Firefox.

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Left the Download Manager open, first with no download, then with a download running.  After Firefox was closed but the Download Manager was not (and in the second case, after the download finished), I closed the Download Manager.
2. Left the Library open, closing it after I closed Firefox.
3. (Preface: I have my Download Manager set to not appear, and instead show the running download in the Status Bar unless I click that) Left a download running with the Download Manager not open, then closed Firefox.
Actual Results:  
Nothing happened, in all three cases the parent.lock file disappeared as it should, so I failed to reproduce it.  But it happens quite often in any case, when I'm not monitoring the parent.lock file.

Expected Results:  
I didn't actually expect it to work, I was just hoping I could recreate it for your sake.  It seems as if I'm answering these boxes opposite what they're meant to represent, the above being the problem and this being how it should have worked... no, it worked just like it should have... :-/

I'm using the default theme, and have no Firefox extensions at all.

One additional bit of info:  I found in "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox" a profiles.ini.  Upon setting the "IsRelative" field to 0, Firefox started, created a blank profile, and changed "IsRelavtive" back to 1 and "Path" to the new xxxxxxxx.default profile, as should be expected.  After this I closed Firefox, deleted all the info in the new profile's folder, and copied the data from my old profile folder into this folder.  Upon it giving me an error about copying the "parent.lock" file (what I was hoping for actually) and two other files I said to skip them.  Then, upon opening Firefox, it came up just as I always remembered it!  :-D  Blah, not real user-friendly eh?

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

This looks like a system/File system problem on your side if you have a parent.lock file after booting and if you can not delete it.
If the systems doesn't allow to delete the file then Firefox also can not delete it and FF thinks that the profile is already in use. This lock file should prevent a profile from being accessed by 2 running firefox processes which would result in a destroyed profile.

You may want to use such tools such as http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/opened_files_view.html to see which application locked which file.

marking invalid because the file was locked after a reboot without running Firefox.