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Firefox keeps wanting to reboot, won't install or uninstall and won't finish the update it keeps telling me to reboot for, what do I do!?

treehugnhipi
treehugnhipi

Firefox was fine until the last update, now it keeps giving me a message saying it needs to reboot, i tried that multiple times to no avail. On the support forum I read the threads of others who have had this issue and tried them, again to no avail. When I tried to delete it from Program Files for a clean reinstall, I got an error message saying that Firefox was running & could not be deleted. It was not running, just in case I looked in processes in Task Manager to see if anything from Firefox was running in the background, it wasn't. Tried this several times as well with several reboots & again, not fixed. I tried deleting it from the profiles folder, I got the reboot message again. I've also tried to shred the files through McAfee and, you guessed it, nada. Please help! I'm going on hour 3 of unrelenting failure this is exceedingly frustrating  :/

Firefox was fine until the last update, now it keeps giving me a message saying it needs to reboot, i tried that multiple times to no avail. On the support forum I read the threads of others who have had this issue and tried them, again to no avail. When I tried to delete it from Program Files for a clean reinstall, I got an error message saying that Firefox was running & could not be deleted. It was not running, just in case I looked in processes in Task Manager to see if anything from Firefox was running in the background, it wasn't. Tried this several times as well with several reboots & again, not fixed. I tried deleting it from the profiles folder, I got the reboot message again. I've also tried to shred the files through McAfee and, you guessed it, nada. Please help! I'm going on hour 3 of unrelenting failure this is exceedingly frustrating :/

Chosen solution

Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps to remove the Firefox program folder.

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All Replies (5)

Andrew
Andrew
  • Moderator

Hello!

I am sorry to hear that you are frustrated. Please check the processes tab for firefox.exe in the task manager and end it. Then try a clean reinstall.

Thank you!

Modified by Andrew

treehugnhipi
treehugnhipi Question owner

Thank you for the suggestion but as I mentioned, I did do that, and it is NOT running in the background. I just looked again after a restart and it still is NOT running but I am still getting the error message that it is so I can't delete it.

Andrew
Andrew
  • Moderator

Try rebooting the computer, do NOT open Firefox and then try the clean reinstall.

Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. Please follow these steps:

Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.

  1. Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org and save the setup file to your computer.
  2. After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (click Exit from the Firefox or File menu).
  3. Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
    • Windows:
      • C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
      • C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
    • Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
    • Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
  4. Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
    1. Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
    2. Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.

Please report back to see if this helped you!

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator

Chosen Solution

Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps to remove the Firefox program folder.

treehugnhipi
treehugnhipi Question owner

THANK YOU BOTH! This whole process made my computer lock up & restore to a previous date but somehow after that I was able to do a clean restart in safe mode (I forgot to mention that, everything I was doing I was switching between trying normal & in safe mode)!!! Thank you so much I was losing my mind!