Firefox crashes at startup (no safe mode or profile manager)

[Meetloaf13]

No offense, but I feel like we're going in circles like crazy. See my OP and one of my posts a few down.
The directory "profiles" is never created, a 'default' profile is never created. The ONLY way I can get Firefox to open is to create one of these makeshift profiles.

I will snoop around in the registry and see what I can find, however, I have been uninstalling firefox with Revo Uninstaller, which does a decent job of cleaning up Reg entries from uninstalled files.

[patrickjdempsey]

I have been uninstalling firefox with Revo Uninstaller, which does a decent job of cleaning up Reg entries from uninstalled files.

It's entirely possible that Revo borked your registry entry. But I generally don't trust 3rd-party tools to do things like this. Do you know how to use regedit? You may need to try to uninstall Firefox using the Firefox uninstaller and then use regedit to manually remove the Firefox-related entries and then reinstall.

Edit: and if you used Revo before installing the new version this may have been what caused this whole problem to begin with. As far as going around in circles goes... there's only so much we can do, and generally when people say they've "tried everything" they've generally missed one important step, so reiterating the important steps is the only way that we can know what you have and have not done. No mind-readers here yet.

[Meetloaf13]

Yeah, I'm in the registry poking around. Sorry, if I sounded miffed, just wanted to keep things on-point.

I do appreciate your help, this isn't a common problem and I realize I may have to do more leg work than normal. I'll report back if I find anything lingering in the registry.

[patrickjdempsey]

It's understandably frustrating!

[Meetloaf13]

I have good news, I did two things, I deleted the following keys (and a few others) and rebooted:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Tracing\firefox_RASAPI32
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Tracing\firefox_RASMANCS

I also went through Comodo Firewall plus and made sure everything was allowed...however, I don't think that should have mattered, as I was having these problems with Comodo disabled.

I installed FF & a default profile has been created =]

Thanks for talking me through all of this, I'll report back if I have any other problems.

Thanks!

[patrickjdempsey]

You are welcome!

[Meetloaf13]

Well, good news is that the profile was created, bad news is it's still having weird crashes. I'll have to mess with it another day. I may, after tax season, just clean install my machine and start FRESCO =]

As I mentioned before, if I can track down a cause, I'll post back here.

Thanks again

[patrickjdempsey]

If it is crashing in a clean profile, it's possibly hardware related. Options > Advanced > General > uncheck hardware acceleration.

[Meetloaf13]

No dice =[

[Alice]

I'm glad you got Firefox to create %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxx.default after deleting those registry entries and reinstalling Firefox.

You said you're still getting "weird" crashes. Do you see the Mozilla Crash Reporter and allow it to submit a crash report? If so, those Crash IDs should be filed in the %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Crash Reports\submitted folder.

If you can open Firefox and get to the about:crashes page, see if there are links to submitted crash report(s), which you should post here.
Ref: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mozilla_Crash_Reporter#Using_the_application_to_view_crash_reports

[Meetloaf13]

So, I uninstalled again and reinstalled, same behavior as before where no default profile is created.

Before, I was getting "crashes" but they weren't the traditional FF crashes and the Crash Reporter did not hook them. The program would freeze up and I'd have to force close.

I'm going to chalk this up as a couple year's worth of muck compounding to mess something up. It very well could have been Revo Uninstaller (I think I may have used Your Uninstaller at the time). But, after all this trouble shooting, I remember running this program before uninstalling & reinstalling:
http://www.firefox64bit.com/

I've scanned and rescanned for malware with no results. Virustotal also turns out nothing: https://www.virustotal.com/url/1aa5e907 ... /analysis/

If I were a betting man, that is my culprit =\

I've tried taking ownership of the firefox directories with my current user, but nothing seems to help. At this point, I'll probably use portable firefox until I can wipe clean the OS this summer.

If you have any other suggestions, I'm all ears, thanks for your continued support.