Hi Bradygirl,

Have a look at these two articles

1. The program must close to allow a previous installation attempt to complete
   which sounds like the problem you are describing, and requires you to find and delete a particular file, then
2. How to install Firefox on Windows

I do not know where you are getting firefox from, but try:

• http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html or
• http://www.getfirefox.com/

If the above advice works please mark the question as solved, otherwise if you continue to have problems, post back again, giving details of what happened and I am sure someone will continue to try to help.

Remember you must use an account with administrative privileges, and also you may need to temporarily disable security software to complete the installation.

Good luck,
John

I tried the xp7 fix and my search didnt come up with any thing for xpicleanup.dat. to bad, that would have been so easy! thanks for trying, got anything else?

First of all, if you have had firefox installed look through

• firefox hangs
• "Firefox is already running but is not responding" error - How to fix

Have you used firefox previously, have you got any bookmarks etc that you need to ensure are retained ?
Or have you never even got firefox installed properly and working in the first place ?

There may be ways to study what the installer is doing whilst it attempts the uninstall, but your problem is getting it to work whether you uninstall or not.

A quick but safe solution may be to try an install again,

1. but take the custom option
2. choose another location for the install eg. C:\Program Files\2ndMozilla Firefox

I do not know if the above idea will work but it seems worth a try.

firefox doesnt do anything at all, only when i try to unistall it it gives the message to reboot the complete previous install. I had been using it and it offered an upgrade, then it just never worked again. so neither of those 2 articles apply I will try the custom install now and report back. if this doesnt work do you think removing the entire firefox folder would be ok I dont remember what I had saved in my favorites, but Ill do whatever nessary to fix this- I hate internet explorer!

hey thanks! it appeared that worked! thanks again!

Glad it helped,
It probably would have been better to get to the root cause of the problem but if it is working again that is the important thing.

You could have problems at some later date, and one of the most important things is likely to be your collection of bookmarks. It will be worthwhile regularly making manual backups of those, and keeping them somewhere safe outside of the main firefox folders, if you ever need to do a full uninstall and reinstall, including deletion of old firefox data at least you will then be able to reinstate bookmarks. see Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer

As an example of what can easily go wrong, and an add-on recommended by another poster see thread "I deleted by mistake bookmarks by uninstalling the previous version of Firefox beta 4.011b... Is there anyway to recover them?" leading to http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/#bb as a method of automatically backing up bookmarks and profile information.

Well after trying all the other solutions this seemed to work (setting up a 2ndmozillafirefox directory).. never could find the file xpicleanup.dat. as mentioned in the other solutions.. Anyway thanks, firefox back up and running... for now at least :)