Firefox is already running, but is not responding? Simple answers don't seem to be working
I started Firefox earlier today, and got a message about a Firefox issue and that it needed to be reset. Since the other option seemed worse than reseting, and Reseting Firefox seemed relatively painless, I clicked okay. A brief message popped up about successfully saving passwords, bookmarks, etc. Then a smaller window appeared, saying it was cleaning up Firefox. During that, the process seemed to freeze up. I closed it out, killed any firefox processes running, and tried to restart Firefox, when I got the "Firefox is already running, but not responding." message. There's a folder on my desktop labeled "Old Firefox data" which I assume came from the Firefox Reset (There's also now a copy of the profile on my desktop, just incase).
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-already-running-not-responding
I found this and have been trying to work through it, but it doesn't seem to be helping.
1) Ther'es no Firefox.exe in my taskmanager, nor is there a plugin-container process.
2) I deleted the "parent.lock" file in both the profile (Which is just a bunch of jumbled letters and numbers with "default" in it), and the Old Firefox folder. However, these files were just "parent.lock" not "parent.lock.parentlock"
3) I didn't change the name on it, so unless the reset did before it locked up, I have no idea what to change it back to.
4) Its not a file share, so...
5) This might be a possibility. The Firefox folder that my profile is in is "Read Only" but I can't seem to change that. Everytime I go in, unselect "Read Only" and tell it to propagate the change through the subfolders, it seems to work, but when I check the properties 10 seconds later, "Read Only" is checked again.
Chosen solution
Sounds that the profiles.ini got corrupted when removing the old default profile and adding the new profile.
You may have security software that was preventing Firefox from making changes to the file.
You will have to use the Profile Manager to either restore an existing profile or create a new profile.
A "Reset" creates a new default profile with a time stamp appended and tries to import some settings from the old profile leaving the old profile intact, including the (invalidated) cache folder (about:cache) that can take up to 1 GB.
Firefox 15+ versions will move the old profile folder to an "Old Firefox Data-##" folder on the Desktop that gets a number appended if you use reset more than once, so you can no longer use the profile manager to revert to the old profile.
See also:
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Chosen Solution
Sounds that the profiles.ini got corrupted when removing the old default profile and adding the new profile.
You may have security software that was preventing Firefox from making changes to the file.
You will have to use the Profile Manager to either restore an existing profile or create a new profile.
A "Reset" creates a new default profile with a time stamp appended and tries to import some settings from the old profile leaving the old profile intact, including the (invalidated) cache folder (about:cache) that can take up to 1 GB.
Firefox 15+ versions will move the old profile folder to an "Old Firefox Data-##" folder on the Desktop that gets a number appended if you use reset more than once, so you can no longer use the profile manager to revert to the old profile.
See also:
Thanks for the tip on the profile manager, that seems to have lead to progress.
Well, I'm not sure if this is a complete fix or not, but when I opened up the profile manager, there were two there. A "default" and a "default" with a long string of numbers attached to it. Playing a hunch I told firefox to use that one and the program loaded up fine, and had almost all of my data (some of my options, such as the start page had changed, but other than that, passwords, bookmarks, etc were there). It looks like my addons are missing, but that should take about 30 seconds to fix. The top looks a little different, but that might just be some of the missing icons from addons and maybe a few cosmetic changes.
Its worked several times now, but I'm not sure if this is a permanent fix or not?
Should I be looking at anything else to clean up?
Modified by Wraith
A profile name with a number (time stamp) appended to it is the result of using "Reset" to create a new profile.
If both profiles were displayed in the Profile Manager then it appears that registering the new profile has worked, but something went wrong with removing the old profile and setting the new profile as the default by marking it with a "Default=1" flag in profiles.ini.
Well, its a few days later and everything seems to be working, so I'm pretty sure this is fixed. I assume at this point I can delete the old profile labeled "Default" and I can delete the "Old Firefox Profile" on my desktop without any worry?