Firefox constantly crashing

March 24, 2009 6:27 AM

Wiped PC, reinstalled XP, now Firefox crashes VERY frequently.

I can't get a mozilla version to run stable. Tried 3 and 2, two crashes slightly less often but still at least every half hour. The machine's clean, and AVG is updated and running. Crashes are on loads of random pages (google.com, for instance, or mefi) and cannot be reliably reproduced on specific pages. The browser goes away and the error reporting thing comes up. Any ideas?

posted by stupidsexyFlanders to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Can you try running Portable Firefox? Because it keeps its preferences and settings and everything completely self-contained it may be less likely to be affected by whatever is going on.
posted by bcwinters at 6:31 AM on March 24

Are you trying to restore your old profile? My firefox crashed all over the place when I tried to restore my profile on a fresh install.

I had missed the bit about needing the profiles folder names to match exactly. Soon as the folder names matched, the crashing stopped.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Backing+up+your+information
posted by Ness at 7:01 AM on March 24

The exact same thing kept happening to me after I inadvertently reduced my virtual memory. Increasing it by a few hundred megabytes fixed everything right away
posted by rollick at 7:26 AM on March 24

Is there any pattern to its crashes? Mine crashes on ~40% of flash, so I installed flashblock.
posted by valadil at 7:34 AM on March 24

I received a new laptop through work and started having this exact same problem. I disabled all extentions, ran in safe mode, installed previous versions, copied profiles from machines that worked, etc., etc. and nothing fixed it. I finally managed to figure out that had to do with the built in wireless radio in this particular laptop (Intel 4965AG). Somehow there is a conflict between FF and this particular wireless radio. If I use an old Linksys WUSB54G external USB adapter it runs flawlessly. That was as far as I got though. I was unable to find any helpful info about the problem.
posted by jluce50 at 8:25 AM on March 24