656667 - Display driver stopped and recovered: Nvidia Windows Kernel Mode 258.96

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[SGP]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; SLCC2; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; Tablet PC 2.0; .NET4.0C)
Build Identifier:             Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Screen goes black for a second and then re-displays.  A pop-up box comes from the bottom of my screen with the message printed in the summary.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Just open bunch of tabs and start browsing.  I don't know exactly what triggers it, but I've had to start using IE because it's too annoying.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

Is your Issue reproducible in Safe-Mode?
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Is your Issue reproducible when you disable the Hardware Acceleration and restart Firefox?
If yes, please post the Content of the Graphics Section you can get via "about:support" after you re-enabled Hardware Acceleration.

Comment 2

[SGP]

I will try it in safe mode tomorrow and let you know. I'm not a techie, so disabling the hardware acceleration is foreign to me.  But safe mode, I can do.

Comment 3

[SGP]

There doesn't seem to be a problem in Safe Mode, so I guess it's one of the add-ins that's causing it.

Comment 4

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I will try it in safe mode tomorrow and let you know. I'm not a techie, so
> disabling the hardware acceleration is foreign to me.  But safe mode, I can
> do.

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Troubleshooting%20extensions%20and%20themes?s=Hardware+Acceleration&as=s#w_turn-off-hardware-acceleration

Comment 5

[jon]

I can reproduce this by loading a very, very large image, such as the NASA 8,000 pixel image of Earth. Direct link here:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7151/6760135001_14c59a1490_o.jpg

It happened a couple times while loading the image, including one permanent crash that required a reboot. Once the image is loaded, scrolling around and switching back and forth between the zoomed and unzoomed state will cause the crash at random, but repeatably.

This is with Firefox 12.0 on Windows 7 32-bit on a laptop with a Quadro FX 570M, nVidia driver version 8.17.12.6776 (which is a bit old, I know, I will update and see whether it can be repeated).

Comment 6

[jon]

Forgot to mention that the case above also sometimes crashes Firefox itself (reports were generated and sent).

According to the new driver, the nVidia version for the report above was 267.76 (the 8.17.12.6776 number came from the Display Adapter Driver dialog).

The newest version (released 4/27/2012) exhibits the same behaviors, including Firefox sometimes crashing as well as the driver itself crashing -- sometimes recovering, sometimes not.

The new version is 296.70 by nVidia's numbering (or in the Windows driver dialog, 8.17.12.9670).

Comment 7

[Jason]

I had the same issue, but after going through my add-ons I noticed a new add-on I had installed that was causing the issue. After disabling the offending add-on, Firefox no longer crashes. One last thing, this may not work for everyone, but I noticed the one sure fire way to reproduce the crash is by jacking up the video memory usage i.e. using Tab Groups.