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Firefox Windows "Vanish" & Re-appear on Restart

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  • Last reply by bsfinkel

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This is a continuation of the problem report (with the exact same question) that had no solutions and was recently closed. I have no idea why an active problem report was closed.

I had the same problem last night. After a BSOD Firefox started (I start it automatically via the startup menu). Only 9 of my 10 Firefox windows were started; the main window I use was not started. Note that I ALWAYS run Firefox with add-ons disabled. I took a dump of the firefox.exe application via the task manager. Then I clicked on "Help - Restart with Add-ons Disabled...", and Firefox re-started with all my 10 windows. How do we diagnose what is happening? Is there anything in the dump that might help in resolving this? If not, is there any other diagnostic tool that we can use to figure out what is happening? This does not happen with every start/restart of Firefox, but it happens often enough to want me (a computer professional) to find a solution. Thanks.

--Barry Finkel

This is a continuation of the problem report (with the exact same question) that had no solutions and was recently closed. I have no idea why an active problem report was closed. I had the same problem last night. After a BSOD Firefox started (I start it automatically via the startup menu). Only 9 of my 10 Firefox windows were started; the main window I use was not started. Note that I ALWAYS run Firefox with add-ons disabled. I took a dump of the firefox.exe application via the task manager. Then I clicked on "Help - Restart with Add-ons Disabled...", and Firefox re-started with all my 10 windows. How do we diagnose what is happening? Is there anything in the dump that might help in resolving this? If not, is there any other diagnostic tool that we can use to figure out what is happening? This does not happen with every start/restart of Firefox, but it happens often enough to want me (a computer professional) to find a solution. Thanks. --Barry Finkel

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In response to guigs' questions - I restart Firefox more than usual (for some definition of "usual"); after reboots (WIndows patches), after BSODs (unresolved 1116 TDR video driver timeouts),, Firefox crashes, and after Firefox runs slowly and is using 1.4 Gb (or more) of private space. I keep a log, but I have not separated Firefox statistics. Most of the time, when Firefox restarts, all of the windows appear. A small percentage of the time, Firefox starts and later i realize that a window I want to use is missing. I can gather statistics, if you want. But these might not be accurate because there may have been times when a window is missing, but I have not had a need to use that window between restarts of Firefox.

The problem is that the missing/vanishing windows situation does not occur at every restart; if it did, then the missing windows would be truly missing and not re-appear on a restart.

--Barry Finkel

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