Why is Firefox having problems with add-ons since I upgraded to 3.6.9?
Firefox upgraded it self today to the latest version 3.6.9 and now my add-ons don't start. I can still see them in the Tools>Add-ons>Extensions window. But they are not running. I have allready tried to delete the extensions.ini, extensions.rdf and extensions.cache files but it didn't help. And if I click on any of the Option buttons in the Add-ons window it just freezes. Firefox keeps runing and seemes unafected but the Add-ons window doesn't respond any more. I can't close it and it even stayes open after I close Firefox.
Modified
All Replies (3)
You can try "Disable all add-ons" and "Reset all user preferences to Firefox defaults" on the Safe mode start window.
Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.
See Basic Troubleshooting: Make a new profile
If that new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile (be careful not to copy corrupted files)
See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox
cor-el, thank you for your reply.
I tried disabling all add-ons and resetting all user preferences but it didn't fix the problem. So I tried your second recommendation. And when I booted Firefox with the new Profile everything was OK. I added my add-ons and they worked great. The only problem was that if I closed Firefox the new profile I created disappeared. The old, corrupt profile was still there but the new one wasn't. In the end I even deleted the old, default profile. This only made the matter worse. Every newely created profile would still disapeare if I closed Firefox and without a profile Firefox wouldn't start, saying that it is already running in the background and that I should stop the process or reboot my PC. Needless to say there was no firefox.exe process running in the background and even rebooting wouldn't make Firefox start. Well not knowing what to do next I did a compete uninstall of Firefox, rebooted my PC and installed a fresh copy of Firefox 3.6.9. I imported my bookmarks and added my add-ons and (for now) everything works as it should.
Thank you again for your effort.
If a new profile doesn't hold then that sounds like a problem with profiles.ini
Do you still see the new profile folder in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ ?
See Firefox Profile Folder
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
Vista/Windows 7: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
It is possible that some security software is blocking or protecting the profiles.ini file and that will prevent a new profile from staying.