584027 - Crashes on startup every time w/ error box fatal every time

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Marty Hewes]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6.5; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 3.6.8 from here http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ie.html

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Line Number 541, Column 15:              0 oncommand="gContextMenu.bookmarkThisPage();"/>
--------------^

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Sartup
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Does not start up, error box appears.

Expected Results:  
Startup

I was running an older version of Firefox.  Did XP updates, Firefox wouldn't start up after that, no error box.  I installed 3.6.8 from page above, still won't start, but now it pops up an error box.  Could be dependant upon tabs I had open at the last good shutdown, or maybe XP updates cause incompatibility.  It does not offer to boot to only home page, so I can't try that.

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Does it start in safe mode? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+mode

Comment 2

[Marty Hewes]

Same failure continuing in safe mode with no boxes checked or "make changes and continue" with any single box checked except for "Delete all bookmarks except for backups".  I did not try that one for fear of wiping out all my bookmarks.

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Create a new test profile and test there. http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles

Comment 4

[Marty Hewes]

I created a profile named "test", highlighted it in the profile editor and clicked "Start Firefox", same failure.  Tried offline, that also fails.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Which language of Firefox do you downloaded ?

Comment 6

[Marty Hewes]

Downloaded and installed English.

I tried the safe mode boot in the test profile I created in the profile editor, with all boxes checked.  Same crash.

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I don't understand that. A new profile should always fix this. The only other problem could be a bad language version of the application itself.

Can you please uninstall Firefox and manually delete the application directory in c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox and reinstall it ?
This should not delete your current profile because it's stored under your user settings directory unless you enable the checkbox during the uninstall that the uninstaller should delete your data,

Comment 8

[timeless]

The relevant snippet is probably this:
194       <menuitem id="context-bookmarkpage"
195                 label="&bookmarkPageCmd2.label;"
196                 accesskey="&bookmarkPageCmd2.accesskey;"
197                 oncommand="gContextMenu.bookmarkThisPage();"/>

afaict, gecko 1.9.1 and gecko 1.9.2 have these identifiers. I don't have an easy way to check 1.9.0. It wasn't present in gecko 1.8, but that's many years ago.

Comment 9

[Marty Hewes]

First, is it possible that this is caused by the fact that I installed to D:\Firefox instead of C:...?  Is there a path hard coded that assumes C:?  I always partition and put as little as possible on C: in case of a virus wiping out C:.

OK, I looked in Programs for an uninstall.  None there.  I tried "Control Panel" "Add Remove", not there.  I navigated to the installed directory, which is D:\Firefox on my machine, and found an uninstall (not vary easy for the computer illiterate), found an uninstall, and ran it.  

I noticed that there was a lot of stuff not uninstalled.  I did not uninstall what was left behind, because, well, I did not read the email that completely.  My bad, I'll blame the Scotch.  I reinstalled to the same directory, D:\Firefox (on my machine), and it now boots and works.  My bookmarks are still there, but it does not start with my usual set of startup tabs.  I wonder if something in a startup tab was causing the crash?  Where are those stored?  But I'd think creating the new test profile would have eliminated those?  Creating a new profile doesn't carry over the startup tabs from another profile, does it?

By the way, thanks for the effort.  I like Firefox, it seems to work better on my Linux machine.  Most things do.

Marty

Comment 10

[timeless]

we don't have hard coded paths.

the installer would have put an entry into add remove if you used it... not sure how it disappeared.

a new profile will definitely exclude your startup tabs from the old profile