491107 - computer crashes after downloading about 15% of open office

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[jere]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.1.20) Gecko/20081217 Firefox/2.0.0.20
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10

Download of open office starts and proceeds normally for about 1 minute at about 325kB/sec.  At this time, the computer freezes but the disk activity light is on and not blinking.  The system is totally frozen and can only be restarted using the reset button.  I have tried to download to different logical drives with no change in behavior.  The system is lightly loaded and I should have more than sufficient resources both disk and memory.  Never had the problem before the latest update.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Navigate to www.openoffice.org
2.start download of open office
3.
Actual Results:  
after about 1 minute, the system freezes


At the time of the crash, Windows task manager reports 11% CPU and 239,864KB of memory used.  Task manager also shows about 710,000 KB memory free.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Please open the taskmanager before the freeze happens and let it be in front.
You are hitting a Windows/driver/hardware bug if you really can't kill the Firefox process with the open taskmanager. There is nothing we can do in such a case because it's not our fault.

Comment 2

[jere]

This behavior is new and didn't happen prior to the last update.

I have been using Firefox since version 1.<something> and it has always worked flawlessly.  Other than the Firefox update about 3 or 4 days ago, the hardware and software of this computer are unchanged.

Comment 3

[jere]

What I did not try was downloading some other large file other than open office.  I went out to redhat and downloaded the latest live CD with no problem.

Could this problem be with openoffice.org?  I had assumed that all I would do is download the latest open office as a single file and install from there.

More news:

I returned to openoffice.org and looked for another download link.  I found one at http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US and successfully downloaded open office 3.0.1.

I will return to the main download point on their main page and check again to see if the computer crashes again.

Comment 4

[jere]

Yet more news:

I tried downloading open office through the main download page one more time tonight and it worked!

I tried the exact same procedure last night 4 times and all 4 times, the download crashed in about the same place.  I tried two additional times after gaining access to bugzilla and both of those times, the download crashed.

At this time, I guess the problem is cleared although I have absolutely no idea why.  Magical cures bother me a little but I don't really have the resources to track it any farther.

Sorry to have bothered you.

Cordially,
Jere

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Again, if windows itself freezes it's a windows system issue (the OS itself, the drivers which includes firewall drivers , the hardware) and it doesn't matter if you get this only with a changed Firefox version and only with this version.

There is only one thing that a userspace application like Firefox can do: allocate all available system memory and make the system slow. Opening the taskmanager before trying to crash the OS and you are sure that you can kill such a process that is doing that.

marking invalid and thanks for your response.

I most cases a Firewall is causing such issue and deactivating the Firewall doesn't help because the firewall driver (which runs in the kernel space) is still running, you need to uninstall it.