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Screen 'timeout' to gray transparency screen requires F5 - super annoying

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After a short time of inactivity - as little as a few seconds - the screen turns to a gray transparency and I loose mouse control. I can continue to type, but if I mouse over and change the cursor location, then there is no way to return. An F5 refresh is required to remove the grayout, and results in loosing whatever fields have data. For example, I had to type this twice - the first time grayed out and when refreshed lost my comments.

This is incredibly detrimental to productivity. It started after the v26.0 BETA installed from the update channel.

I found a few comparable forum postings on the web - none of them were directly attributable but seemed to have comparable problem. I'd copy past the links here, but in the time it takes to search for the sites then the screen will grayout and I will have to rewrite this again.

After a short time of inactivity - as little as a few seconds - the screen turns to a gray transparency and I loose mouse control. I can continue to type, but if I mouse over and change the cursor location, then there is no way to return. An F5 refresh is required to remove the grayout, and results in loosing whatever fields have data. For example, I had to type this twice - the first time grayed out and when refreshed lost my comments. This is incredibly detrimental to productivity. It started after the v26.0 BETA installed from the update channel. I found a few comparable forum postings on the web - none of them were directly attributable but seemed to have comparable problem. I'd copy past the links here, but in the time it takes to search for the sites then the screen will grayout and I will have to rewrite this again.

All Replies (3)

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Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over the problem.


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

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cor-el,

on some pages there is an (x) in the top left corner of the tab window. If I press this (x) then the gray screen is removed and the page is usable again. My University email page is like this.

Please consider this new information and let me know if you still want a profile test done

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I have tried the Firefox Factory reset but surely this is a simple timeout matter and not an inactive keyboard monitoring problem. I'll see if the Reset works. At first I thought this was a Sky Broadband monitoring program like BT use (I think) as the connection would get lost if I didn't do anything for a while but Sky wants the connection always on, so I couldn't suss it out. Now it just looks like a Firefox upgrade issue.