couchtripper

In the past weeks I've noticed that since Firefox updated the program had been crashing fairly often, particularly with Gmail. After getting well annoyed about it I finally found a page with some info about it. It turns out that the 'adblock' add-on was causing it. I've disabled it now and things seem to be working perfect again.

I've no idea how this adblock thing was there as I don't remember installing it, so maybe it came as part of the update...

edit: that's not sorted the problem at all. Has anyone else this problem with FF crashing?

A long time ago I had some stability issues with FF. This was probably early in the v. 1.5 days (or earlier). At the time, I resolved the issue by deleting my profile folder and starting with a fresh profile. Since then, I've had no problems at all and use several (perhaps too many) add-ons, including adblock.

If you're concerned about losing your bookmarks, you can easily copy the bookmark.html file first.

If you want to test whether it's actually a profile issue, you could run firefox with a --profilemanager parameter to create a new (virgin) profile and see if that still crashes. If so, uninstall FF, reboot, re-install.

cheers major, I'll give that a go - though I've not heard of the profilemanager parameter before

No worries. Let us know how it goes.

btw, would I be correct in guessing your O/S is WinXP and you're using the latest version of FireFox? (2.0.0.6)

yeah, that's what I'm at. I tried running FF in safe mode and found out (after some trial and error) that it was personal settings that is affecting it. I'm currently running that mode still as it's not crashing.

I've looked at finding personal settings but can't see them - have you any suggestions?

I think all of the personal settings are under your profile folder. This will be something like: c:\documents and settings\<userid>\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles\<some>\

I can only guess that one of the files (such as prefs.js) is either corrupted or has an illegal value in it.

Have you tried creating a new profile? This would probably be easier than hunting for an invalid setting. (start, run, "firefox --profilemanager")

ok, after a few days of the computer getting less and less stable (to the point of actually crashing to blue-screen) I managed to work out that it seems to have been down to an IRQ clash caused by the YouTube Download Accelerator... I should have thought about that as I updated it last week.

Wow! That's surprising, but it's a good thing you found the cause.

If you want to download youtube videos, you might want to try the VideoDownloader addon for Firefox. That seems to work pretty well...

faceless wrote:ok, after a few days of the computer getting less and less stable (to the point of actually crashing to blue-screen) I managed to work out that it seems to have been down to an IRQ clash caused by the YouTube Download Accelerator... I should have thought about that as I updated it last week.

Face, did you manage to point out what registry entry was causing this trouble?

it was a file called sbbotd1.sys - I just uninstalled the program completely and it seems to be ok now

FYI, when I had the problem, I went to Safe mode : "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -safe-mode

if that is stable, then untick all add-ins, and attach one by one till you find which one causes the crash.

Though of-course, wouldn't have helped in your case (unless the Accelerator was an add-on)