Hey there,
I hope you guys can help me with this. At least I'm hoping to get some ideas. I'm trying to describe my problem as good as possible.
First of all let me say that it doesn't matter if I use Firefox Portable or a ESR version, both behave the same. Out of 10 releases 9 versions cause the same problem. Also this problem haunts me like forever now. I'm on Win7 SP1 64bit if that's important.
When I start FF there's a 50/50 chance it won't start. When this happens the firefox.exe task is visible in the Task Manager. It always(!) has a size of ~17MB. It stays there till I kill the task but the GUI never comes up.
This happens after my computer and therefore several other programs were running for some time. There's not need for it to run long tho. Sometimes it happens after minutes, sometimes it happens after hours. But whenever I have to restart FF, update an addon or it simply chrashed there's a huge chance I can't restart it.
Now the weird thing is, other programs seem to be part of the problem. For example, I just had this problem while the only other program left open was Teamspeak. As soon as I closed Teamspeak I was able to start FF as if nothing happened. A few minutes ago I updated to FF41. So I started it, updated an already installed addon and wanted to restart FF. When I tried...boom, just the task, no GUI. While this happened VLC was running. So i quit VLC and tada, FF started again.
You may now think it's a problem with these two programs but no, the same happened after I ended Spotifiy, Replay Media Catcher, games etc etc. It's almost like FF hates all programs.... but only sometimes.
Now, from time to time, there's a FF version that does not come with the problem. For example 34.0.5 worked flawless. All version from 38.x to 41 now however all cause said problem for me.
Since I know you guys will ask, no this doesn't happen with a fresh, unmodified addon-free FF but that knowledge doesn't help me much. Not using too many addons and they are all well-known ones like NoScript or FoxyProxy and I need them.
Do you guys have any ideas? Can I log the start of FF somehow to see what or where it hangs? I'm open for everything and thanks in advance.
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Does this happen with a local install of Firefox as well?
I guess you are talking about the normal, non-portable version? Unfortunately I do not have such version with the same config/setup as the portable one. I would have to "build" one which would take some time. Maybe I can do that on the weekend.
Do you run FirefoxPortable form hdd or from a flash drive. If latter, do you by any chance have the possibiliy to test this on a different computer? I guess, it's a specific problem with your computer or a problem with an add-on.
Another thing, you could do is to disable all add-ons and then start enabling them one by one to see, at which point that error occurs.
Prior to disabling and re-enabling addons, you could try running FirefoxPortable with the -safe-mode commandline to see if this still happens with everything disabled. Following that, try re-enabling one-by-one.
I do run it from HDD.
The thing with disabling addons one by one is complicated. I mean sometimes I can't restart FF for several minutes. So disabling an addon is impossible too during that time. On the other side, when it works and I can disable an addon there's a good chance the problem won't occur for minutes or even hours. I have to think about a way to do this