480677 - system freeze when starting firefox

Status: VERIFIED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel Baulig]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; de; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; de; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6

After a system crash caused by another program firefox wouldn't start anymore. When attempting to start firefox the entire system would stall. First other programs cannot be started anymore, then a few seconds later running programs would start to not react anymore until the entire system freezes and a hard-reset is the only option.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Start Firefox
Actual Results:  
System freezes.

Expected Results:  
Firefox start

Facts:
I run a Vista 64 SP 1 with all recommended updates except the Silverlight update.
I had no problems running firefox before the system crash. I did not change any relevant system configuration or updated firefox in between the last successfull running of firefox and the system crash. I cannot recall if firefox was running during the system crash, but it's very possible. The system crash was propably not due to firefox (I was running a game when my system blue-screened on me; I was not able to recognize the error code), but it may have been.
Reinstalling firefox without removing the user data would not fix the problem.
Purging firefox (including user data) before reinstalling it fixed the problem though. Firefox runs fine now again.
I cannot reproduce the failure now anymore.

Speculation:
The crash left firefox (more precise its user data) in a state that would cause the entire system to malfunction when firefox was started.
Sadly I did not backup the firefox user data before purging it, so I cannot provide the propably corrup data for inspection.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You can create a new profile and let the old one on your system.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles

We can't do anything now without the data and I have to mark it incomplete.
A system freeze is always a bug in the system but you seem to had a Firefox that allocated all the available RAM which is nearly a system freeze.
If you ever get this again open the taskmanager before you start Firefox and watch the allocated memory and create a new profile to get a working firefox.