479405 - Mostly hangs on downloads. Reboot needed

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 470849

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Martin Bless]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

FF usually hangs when a download ist started. The download manager window appears but is not filled. All open FF instances freeze. The 'firefox' process can't be killed in the task manager. FF windows can be minimized though. The problem came somewhen with the 3.x series. It does not make a difference wether the download goes to fixed directory or I choose the destination dir each time.

Measures allready taken:
I deleted all profiles, deinstalled and reinstalled FF. Still got the same problem.

Oberservation: IE, Safari, Opera work as usual. The FF Add-On "Down them all" works as normal. All other programs in my XP work as usual. It's eating up my last nerve - what's going on?

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

This is probably caused by a third party (security) program. What security (anti-virus/firewall) software are you using?

Comment 2

[Martin Bless]

I appreciate your question very much. It gave me hope and I did some more intensive testing. No success yet! In detail here's what I did:
- delete all FF profiles thus starting with a new one
- remove Spybot S&D
- remove ZoneAlarm 7.0.483.000
- turn Avira "Antir Guard" off
- turn Avira "Mail Guard" off

In this (totally unprotected) state I succeeded in downloading five different files with FF. With no other change but turning on the WinXP(sp3) builtin firewall the problem is back immediately!

Half an hour before I was lead to thinking its ZoneAlarm being the "bad guy", since I had Antivir turned on (no problems). And the moment ZoneAlarm was active the problem was back. So maybe spotting the problem somewhere around "FF versus firewall" is a valid hypothesis.

It's a pity: I've been using FF in conjunction with the above programs "for ages". In general no problems. And, as I said, the other browsers and even FF AddOns work. I can't risk working unprotected. Means, I can't use FF in the moment. At least for downloads. 

Q: Is it possible to disable download functionality? Because from time to time I run unintentionally into a download if I'm not paying total attention.

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

it's ZoneAlarm, it doesn't help to deactivate it, their buggy driver is still active and it's a bug in their driver. Firefox hangs in their driver which itself runs in a higher level at the OS and that's the reason why it can't be killed by the taskmanager. 
A few users got this with ZA with different symptoms.

If this is not ZA (ZA is usually doing that only on vista) you have another system issue, that you can't kill Firfefox.exe is enough to be sure.

Comment 4

[Martin Bless]

Confirmation:
Hi Matthias, your note sounded that much straight and self-confident that I gave it a try. AND YES, I can confirm: after totally deinstalling ZoneAlarm I haven't yet encountered the problem again. OTOH I really regret dropping ZA. The questions what kind of bug it is remains since its only FF I'm having the problem with. And I can't remember having a similar problem with the 2.x series of FF.

Anyway: Thank you very much! I was on the edge of dropping FF. (But I couldn't anyway since I'm doing web development ...)

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

It's very easy for us to point to ZA in this case.
No application should get an issue if you install Anti-Virus applications or a Firewall. If the firewall blocks something, Firefox and other applications doesn't get the TCP/IP packets back and should timeout but that's it.

There is some kind of bug in the ZA Firewall driver that runs with kernel mode privileges in the Operating system and that only affects some people and only with Firefox3. It's possible that Firefox sends some unusual TCP/IP packets for performance reasons but that shouldn't kill the ZA driver. It seems that Firefox2 isn't affected but there are 3 years of development between FF2 and FF3 with thousands of changes.
We could start to add a workaround but it's very difficult on our side to find the reason for the bug in one of many firewall products. ZA should fix it on their side but I've given up to contact them, i couldn't get through the Third-Level support of ZA that usually helps users who have problems to handle the software.
BTW: Are you on vista or on windows XP, I've seen this issue in most cases only on vista.

Comment 6

[Martin Bless]

It's WinXP(sp3). A friend of mine has similar problems with WinXP. He also has ZA installed. And again: I'm very grateful for/about (?) your explanations. True or at least trustworthy information is a precious good these days. That's why OTOH I try to be very complete and precise in my descriptions. I'm convinced many more have similar problems but don't achieve crossing the barrier of writing a bug report.