Problems after a Windows update restart

[walkerpbus]

It wants to download the same version of Firefox & doesn't remember the tabs even though it has tab session manager extension. I'm old so please give an easy task to fix it printable to 2 pages max. & 1 hour max to do it.

[allande]

Whenever the computer restarts you have to login to a user account. If you logged in to not your normal user account at that time, Firefox would run, but it would not contain any of your data - no extensions, bookmarks, etc. So, first try restarting windows again, and when logging in make sure you are logging in to your normal account.

If it is not that, someone else may have other suggestions but here are the 3 things I would do.
1. Before doing anything, backup your profile, in the hopes that there may be some way to restore the tabs. (Get a professional to help with this if you need to - for someone who knows what they are doing it should take less than 5 minutes.) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr ... ng-firefox
2. Download and install the current version of Firefox. Note that there are sometimes minor versions - 60.0.2 came out and is different from 60.0.1 and 60.
3. Session managers are famous for not working. If you have some tabs you care about in the future, press ctrl-shift-D to make a folder of bookmarks with those tabs. Then later you can right click on that folder and choose "open all in tabs" to re-open them.

[walkerpbus]

Whenever the computer restarts you have to login to a user account. If you logged in to not your normal user account at that time, Firefox would run, but it would not contain any of your data - no extensions, bookmarks, etc. So, first try restarting windows again, and when logging in make sure you are logging in to your normal account.

If it is not that, someone else may have other suggestions but here are the 3 things I would do.
1. Before doing anything, backup your profile, in the hopes that there may be some way to restore the tabs. (Get a professional to help with this if you need to - for someone who knows what they are doing it should take less than 5 minutes.) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr ... ng-firefox
2. Download and install the current version of Firefox. Note that there are sometimes minor versions - 60.0.2 came out and is different from 60.0.1 and 60.
3. Session managers are famous for not working. If you have some tabs you care about in the future, press ctrl-shift-D to make a folder of bookmarks with those tabs. Then later you can right click on that folder and choose "open all in tabs" to re-open them.

Thank you sir/ma'am, I have printed much of what you wrote plus the advice of Mozilla as well. But If the profile is somehow messed up (I suspect), how can I fix it permanently? Wipe out the old profile or store on top of it(preferred)?

[allande]

Someone could discuss symptoms of why you think the profile is messed up, and potential fixes that address specific issues.

It is very important to try to test that a backup you have made of your profile actually contains the data you most need, passwords, bookmarks etc.

In general I would say there are two paths to take if you feel you have a bad profile. Both can be difficult or risky, so if you can think of other possible ways to fix the problem such as disabling possibly bad extensions or checking for viruses, do those first.
One option - Make a new profile, set it as the default, test that it works ok. Then little by little copy parts from your old profile or the backup of your profile to get back things you would like to have. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... _-_Firefox
Alternate option - Run the Firefox refresh. If this works properly, it moves your old data to a folder on the desktop, and it creates a new profile with some things like your bookmarks imported to it. Extensions and extension settings, such as saved sessions, are I believe lost. If the refresh is interrupted or does not complete successfully, it can trash both the new and old data. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tr ... sh-firefox

[walkerpbus]

Whenever the computer restarts you have to login to a user account. If you logged in to not your normal user account at that time, Firefox would run, but it would not contain any of your data - no extensions, bookmarks, etc. So, first try restarting windows again, and when logging in make sure you are logging in to your normal account.

If it is not that, someone else may have other suggestions but here are the 3 things I would do.
1. Before doing anything, backup your profile, in the hopes that there may be some way to restore the tabs. (Get a professional to help with this if you need to - for someone who knows what they are doing it should take less than 5 minutes.) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr ... ng-firefox
2. Download and install the current version of Firefox. Note that there are sometimes minor versions - 60.0.2 came out and is different from 60.0.1 and 60.
3. Session managers are famous for not working. If you have some tabs you care about in the future, press ctrl-shift-D to make a folder of bookmarks with those tabs. Then later you can right click on that folder and choose "open all in tabs" to re-open them.

Thank you sir/ma'am, I have printed much of what you wrote plus the advice of Mozilla as well. But If the profile is somehow messed up (I suspect), how can I fix it permanently? Wipe out the old profile or store on top of it(preferred)?

Defender needed a restart, Backed up With Mozbackup (yeah I know it's unsupported) but this & Thunderbird came up without a problem. Anybody's opinion?:D

[allande]

If your problem is still occurring, can you confirm the details of the problem you are having? Is Firefox running normally, with search engines, passwords, and data (other than sessions) intact? Was one session or set of tabs lost? Or instead, are sessions not being saved at all every time you close? Do you run any antivirus software other than windows defender? Do you run ccleaner (please avoid it)? I honestly don't use the session saving features much so if you want to try to restore a lost session someone else should step in. The Tab Session Manager extension only has a rating of 3 out of 5 stars - perhaps you could use the built-in session features instead of the ones from an extension.

I see now in the description of the tab session manager extension that there is a common problem. He links to this as the way to fix it - https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session- ... edDB-Error

[walkerpbus]

Just restarted again for another reason & no problems: Thanks to any/all