No there is not a removal tool. Good idea though. You have to manually go in and delete folders on C: plus in the USER folder then have to go through the registry and pull everything. Then I ran Norton Utilities and removed more only to find out at Malwarebytes support running their tools there was more left behind but no idea where.

SO that is the route to go, include the registry in your removal.

Ver 55 final release Aug 8th so guess there will newer versions to have trouble with.

Thank you for your answer, yesterday I tested Firefox(Nightly) in Windows safemode with Network connection and after that in Windows normal mode with Kaspersky Anti-Virus disabled. In both ways Firefox loaded normaly, plus the profile loaded successfully and no error-messages appeared, but in task-manager I had more than one process (2, 6, or sometimes more or less). If I close the main Firefox window, the other processes will close too in both ways.

And if I start Windows in normal mode with Kaspersky on, sometimes I can not shutdown Windows. Wrote that just to add more hints^^

Oh, and I have the 64bit version, don't know if that matters.

So, what I can do is to remove the three folders in the user directory and that one in C:\Program Files. But I don't know how or what to remove in the registry, maybe there is a guide for this? (Don't want to cause more problems^^)

The only thing i did to the registry was to scan and to fix errors in the registry with ccleaner, but that didn't work either.

Hi,

I deleted the following registry entries:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MozillaPlugins] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MozillaPlugins] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\mozilla.org] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\MozillaPlugins]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RegisteredApplications] -> the FIREFOX.EXE entry After that a reboot and reinstalling Firefox(Nightly) 56.0a1 (update from 27.07.17)

That didn't work. Did I forgot something?

Hi, tiny update:

redid the deletion of the registry entries plus the mozilla folders and installed the normal Firefox(ver. 54.0.1). No error-messages so far (yay^^).

So I assume that was/is not a global Firefox problem. I will try Nightly in a few weeks again and hope it will be fixed then. I realy liked Nightly because it ran more fluid and faster on my old Notebook than Firefox(ver. 54.0.1).

update:

Today I installed Nightly (57.0a1) without issues. It's running fine now.

A BIG thank you to all who are working on Nightly!

Cases closed^^

This is a problem with the profiles.ini file that stores data about registered profiles. There can also be a problem with permissions/ownership of involved folders/files preventing access. Locate the profiles.ini file and delete this file or use the Profile Manager to create a new profile.

You can use the button on the "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page.

• Help -> Troubleshooting Information -> Profile Directory:
  Windows: Show Folder; Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox

See:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing-inaccessible

You can delete the profiles.ini file to make Firefox create a new (default) profile or use the Profile Manager to create a new profile or register an orphaned profile.

You can recover an orphaned profile via these steps:

• use the Profile Manager to create a new profile
• click "Choose Folder" in the Profile Manager
• browse to the location of a lost profile to recover this profile and register it in the Profile Manager

Note that you should never use "Choose Folder" to specify a folder that already contains files that do not belong to Firefox (i.e. only use "Choose Folder" to recover an orphaned profile that isn't listed in the Profile Manager)

You can find the profiles.ini file in this hidden location:

• Windows: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
  C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\
• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/
• Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/

If deleting the profiles.ini file isn't working then also check the location of the cache files.

• Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
• Mac: ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/
• Linux:~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/

You can also try to rename/delete the Mozilla\Firefox\ folder in both above mentioned locations (main, cache).

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox

Sorry, just wanted to say it's working now and forgot to mark an answer as problem solved...

But to summarise what I did for that problem I had earlier:

I ...

- tested Firefox(Nightly) in Windows safemode with Network connection - tested in Windows normal mode with Kaspersky Anti-Virus disabled.

In both ways Firefox loaded normaly, plus the profile loaded successfully and no error-messages appeared, but in task-manager I had more than one process (2, 6, or sometimes more or less). If I close the main Firefox window, the other processes will close too in both ways.

And if I start Windows in normal mode with Kaspersky on, sometimes I can not shutdown Windows.

after that I ...

- deleted profile - deleted the profiles.ini file (same problem with new Firefox profile) - created a new profile with firefox.exe -P - deleted the mozilla folders in local, locallow and roaming - uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox - started Firefox as admin

Then after removing Nightly again I deleted the following folders completely:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\ C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\ C:\Users\<user>\AppData\LocalLow\Mozilla\Firefox\

and I deleted the following registry entries:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MozillaPlugins] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MozillaPlugins] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\mozilla.org] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\MozillaPlugins]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RegisteredApplications] -> the FIREFOX.EXE entry

After that I rebooted and installed Nightly (56.0a1) again. But this didn't solve the problem, so I assume there was rather a problem within Nightly(56.0a1) itself than in the profiles.ini file.

After I switched to the normal Firefox(at that time 54.0.1) everything worked fine. And now I have insalled Nightly 57.0.a1 and it's working fine, too.

So problem solved by waiting for a newer version of Nightly.

I think that this is more likely a problem with security software. There wouldn't normally be a problem with the profiles.ini file. A lot of security software thinks that .INI files are important and need to be protected against changes. This will break the Firefox Password Manager since this stores its information in profiles.ini.

"Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" always means the profiles.ini point to a profile folder that doesn't exist anymore, so the last time the Profile Manager was used to create a profile then this data wasn't saved.

You can check on the hard drive in such a case if there are orphaned profiles that aren't registered in profiles.ini. The Windows registry wouldn't have to do with such issues since it is only used to uninstall data and for scanning for extensions and plugins and registering some components and file associations (default browser).

Ok, I got through the registry because Pkshadow suggested it. You could be right with that Kaspersky could protect these .ini files and caused that error message.

But in this case there should only one error-message appear, isn't it? And not tons of messages which prevent Windows from shutdown.

And what was realy odd, was that if I installed Nightly in Windows safe mode + disabled Kaspersky and ran it after that, I had two, six and sometimes even more than eight Firefox processes in the Task-Manager.

By now I am happy that I don't have either problems. Maybe there was something odd only with that earlier version(56.0a1) of Nightly... But I can only guess.

Oh and back to that profiles.ini file:

I always compared the profiles.ini file's path to the Firefox profile with the actual path to the Firefox profile and it was the same everytime (I only had and have one profile for Firefox).

hm... so if the profiles.ini always pointed to the right profile maybe there was an error in the Profile Manager in only this build of Nightly? Again I can only guess.

cor-el said

"Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" always means the profiles.ini point to a profile folder that doesn't exist anymore, so the last time the Profile Manager was used to create a profile then this data wasn't saved.

Pardon my interruption, but the message does not necessarily mean the profile folder is missing or corrupt. In some cases, like I encountered today on my Ubuntu box, Firefox (v 55.0.2) had crashed on the previous run and had left the .parentlock file in the profile directory. All I had to do is delete the file and Firefox started without complaints.

The file is used to indicate that the profile is locked and Firefox should not load it. Sometimes, when Firefox or OS crashes, the file is not removed.

When the profile is locked (in use) then you see a different message that Firefox is already running or otherwise can't be accessed in case you use a -no-remote command line switch. Note that you may also have to wait longer in case you want to close and restart Firefox.

The message that this thread is about is about a problem with the profiles.ini file. This doesn't necessarily mean that the profile is missing. It only means that the profile marked as Default=1 in the profiles.ini file doesn't exist. This can happen if a refresh didn't finish properly.

@cor-el Yes, you are correct. That seemed strange to me, too. I apologise for jumping on this thread. I wrote that before trying to reproduce what I saw and checking the real culprit behind the behaviour.

In my case, the "missing profile" message was caused by me launching Firefox from a link in Synaptic Package Manager (which is running as root user via pkexec). That action starts /usr/bin/sudo -u andy /usr/bin/xdg-open http://example.com, which in turn starts Firefox with an empty temporary profile in /tmp/firefox_andy/. The Firefox process is owned by me but something is not quite right with how xdg-open starts Firefox. Maybe user environment is not passed to the Firefox process or something along those lines.

I'll try to get to the bottom of this issue and see if it should be filed as a bug with Firefox Ubuntu package maintainers.