I'm using Portable Firefox & Portable Thunderbird which I have updated online before I read the FAQ which said this was no longer advisable. Now, when I shut down, I find instances of (non-portable) FF & TB on the host computer, which need to be stopped before I can unplug. ?Is this normal behavior?? ?Is it related to my updates?? ?Should I install the newer Portable versions over the updated ones??
Thanx for the help,
Bill Zigrang
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have any local installs of Firefox and Thunderbird?
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
No.
BZ
What do you mean by "Instances"?
Are you sure they are on your local PC and not the portable version still running?
The cleanest but most complicated way to remove all traces would be to install and then remove a local copy. That would remove all the traces. But maybe just deleting them will do the job too.
Its unfortunate that this issue with the built-in updater and the portable version hasn't been resolved yet
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
By that I mean they appear (FF & TB) alongside of the portable versions in Task Manager, and I have to shut them down to safely remove the USB thumbdrive
FirefoxPortable.exe in Taskmanager is the launcher, firefox.exe the app itself.
When you close the app both launcher and exe will disappear in the process window.
Autoupdating changes some directories in the registry and sets an uninstaller path.
The same is with setting the app as default. You can delete this connection by safely removing the drive and then going to windows software list, "uninstalling" the portable Firefox. You can identify it by the windows standard exe symbol (no firefox branded icon). This will delete the path to the drive. Ditto with thunderbird. After that plug in the drive and update to the new FFPortable by installing a FFPortable over the existing one. Your data should be preserved. A backup before any action should be better..
Q: which ffp version do you run (the 2.0.x launcher had some issues with slow drives -> still running after shutting down the app or preterm finish without closing FF)?
Sometimes the plugins clutch to their local apps and keep the drive from being ejected safely -> Adobe reader has this issue sometimes -> check taskmanager for acro32.exe running without any opened pdf..
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"May The Schwartz be with You!" Yogurt the Yoda
If I understand what is being reported here, I have experienced it as well. I run portable firefox, but also have a local firefox install on the machine. When I am finished using portable firefox I close it, but firefox.exe still shows in task manager, and I cannot eject the drive until I use task manager to kill the process.
This means it is the firefox on the thumbdrive, not the local copy, that is somehow stuck open. The local copy running would not access the thumbdrive and prevent it from ejecting.
Either way, I just kill the instance with task manager and eject the drive, no problem. But this could become an issue on a system where someone does not have rights to task manager. At that point you are forced to pull a drive that has open handles.
It's usually okay to pull a drive that only has read-only handles open (like the one of a running executable). It's only dangerous when you pull one with an outstanding read-write handle(s) (since that means something could be writing to the drive and in that case you'd corrupt the file system).