605712 - Received Firefox update notification tonight, installed it and now no addons work

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[Cathy Vaughn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11 Ubiquity/0.1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11 Ubiquity/0.1.4

The latest Firefox update was pushed out to me tonight (Oct. 19) and I installed it. 
When Firefox restarted I thought it was odd that it didn't show the window where it examines all the installed addons and determines whether they're compatible. It skipped that step and went directly to the Firefox start page.
When the page opened I saw that none of the icons for my installed addons were showing in the toolbars to which they were assigned. I have weather extensions, Google Toolbar for Firefox, Morning Coffee, Update Notifier, Tab Mix Plus, MR Tech Toolkit and Yahoo Mail Notifier and many others that are stationed in the Navigation Bar, Status Bar or Google Toolbar. All of their icons have disappeared and the Google Toolbar is missing. 
I opened the Addons window through the Tools menu and all the addons appear to be there, but clicking on their preference button does nothing, and neither does clicking on their disable/uninstall buttons. In some cases, the Preferences button has disappeared. It's as if the addons are frozen and just don't work. I rebooted my iMac and have repaired permissions, to no avail. 
I moved the Firefox application to the Trash and downgraded to 3.6.10, but nothing changed. I tried upgrading again to 3.6.11 and there's still no change.   

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install latest version of Firefox.
2. Open the application.
3. 
Actual Results:  
No addon icons are visible when page opens.

Expected Results:  
All of the addons I have assigned to the Navigation Bar, Status Bar and Google Toolbar should be visible for use. 

This issue occurs with the default Firefox theme and with a Persona installed. My Bookmarks appear to be intact.

Comment 1

[Cathy Vaughn]

EDIT: When open Tools > Addons window, I see the yellow bar with the message "Restart Firefox to complete your changes."

I've restarted and reinstalled different versions of Firefox several times. In fact, I just tried 3.5 and my addons aren't working with it, either. 
It appears restarting Firefox isn't triggering the installation process.

Comment 2

[Cathy Vaughn]

Also, I think I remember the update message that appeared last night (Oct. 19) when I updated Firefox initially said version 3.6.12. The latest version I see online now is 3.6.11.

Comment 3

[Cathy Vaughn]

EDIT #2. Did some research in the Mozilla knowledge base and renamed these 3 files so the originals would be regenerated: extensions.ini, extensions.cache, extensions.rdf 

It worked. My addons appear to be working now.