662722 - Leaving Firefox open eventually disables drag and drop throughout Windows

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Widget: Win32, defect)

Description

[Ken Wesson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.77 Safari/534.24
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

If Firefox is left open for long enough, drag and drop stops working system-wide. For example, dragging files in Explorer and dropping them won't move them, and right-dragging them won't pop up a menu; instead, the dragging-files graphic just gets left where the mouse button was released, and indeed lingers in front of everything else on the screen.

I am certain the update to FF4 is responsible: this didn't occur before installing FF4, doesn't occur without FF4 running, and closing FF4 temporarily fixes it. However, once it has happened, a while after closing FF4 it will happen again and remain that way until the machine is rebooted.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Firefox on a Windows machine.
2. Leave it open for a few days.
3. Try to drag and drop some files in Explorer.

Actual Results:  
Drag and drop fails, leaving **** on the screen.

Expected Results:  
Drag and drop should operate normally.

This is another weird one that seems to necessarily involve FF provoking bugs that exist in the operating system. Invariably when this occurs the FF process size has bloated to over 800MB(!) but it can't be *just* that, as high memory use by other applications doesn't cause this symptom, only high memory use by FF4, or perhaps it's only a correlation and not causation.

Classing this as major since it forces untimely reboots of the user's entire machine and makes it hazardous to keep FF open in the background for extended periods of time. Since it doesn't outright crash the machine without the user having time to perform a graceful shutdown it doesn't rise to the level of "critical" but it is serious nonetheless.

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Does the issue still occur if you start Firefox in Safe Mode? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

How about with a new, empty profile? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#Make_a_new_profile

Comment 2

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Closing bug as Incomplete - if you are still experiencing this issue or have more information to provide feel free to post back here and we can re-open the bug. You can also get assistance by visiting the Firefox help site -> http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Ask+a+question