Every time I load Firefox, it tries to download a non-existent PDF

July 23, 2014 6:51 PM

I typed a bad PDF name, and the download failed. Now every time I load Firefox, it tries to download the file again, and it fails again. How do I get the file name out of the "to do" list?
posted by KRS to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

ugh, i'm so tired of wasting brain time on problems like this when i encounter them. Nuke your user directory(in documents and settings>yourname>application data on windows, if it's mac google where bookmarks are stored and such and nuke that entire folder).

Export your bookmarks if they would be an issue, but yea. This sounds like something is corrupted in the FF user data and it is not worth trying to pick-and-choose sort it out.
posted by emptythought at 6:56 PM on July 23, 2014

In the top menu, what happens if you click "Tools", then "Downloads", then "Clear Downloads"?
posted by Night_owl at 6:57 PM on July 23, 2014

When you start Firefox, any interrupted downloads from the previous browsing session may be automatically resumed. To manage/stop this behavior, press command + J to open Find and Manage Downloaded Files, and go from there.
posted by rada at 7:01 PM on July 23, 2014

I generally find that nothing slows down Firefox on Windows like the downloaded files menu. Clearing it usually improves performance. But yes, you can delete individual downloads from that interface.
posted by dhartung at 10:14 PM on July 23, 2014

Do you have Firefox set to re-open the same tabs as last time every time it starts? If so, all you should need to do is find the tab that belongs to your misnamed PDF file, and close it.
posted by flabdablet at 11:20 PM on July 23, 2014

Open the download manager in Firefox (Ctrl+J will bring it up quickest), find the offending file, right click it, choose "Remove from history".
posted by Aleyn at 11:22 PM on July 23, 2014

I'd say export bookmarks and then do a full delete, clear directories as suggested by emptythought and then run CCleaner to wipe any traces. Then do a reinstall!
posted by nagoya at 5:19 AM on July 24, 2014

Edit your hosts file so the broken url temporarily points to a working PDF, then change it back after it finishes.
posted by Phssthpok at 6:47 AM on July 24, 2014

Thanks to everybody.
posted by KRS at 7:09 AM on July 31, 2014