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Firefox will not start. In task manager you can see firefox show up, but it immediately dissappears.

  • 4 replies
  • 18 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cymerax

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I had some problems with Spybot Search and Destroy - a laptop on my home network got infected by a hijacker. I used SSD to remove some things from startup and deleted some files(can't rmember details). The next day I could not start Firefox at all. While watching the task manager, when I click on Firefox, I can see it appear briefly and then disappear. I've reinstalled firefox but the problem persists.

I had some problems with Spybot Search and Destroy - a laptop on my home network got infected by a hijacker. I used SSD to remove some things from startup and deleted some files(can't rmember details). The next day I could not start Firefox at all. While watching the task manager, when I click on Firefox, I can see it appear briefly and then disappear. I've reinstalled firefox but the problem persists.

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I've read these and that is not the problem. I DO NOT SEE ANY ERROR MESSAGES. Firefox will simply NOT START. Period. I get no errors, no messages, nothing, it just won't start. I've downloaded it twice and this did not help. As I said before, in the task manager I can see firefox.exe show up, but only for a couple of seconds and then it dissappears and nothing happens, it doesn't seem to load. Can some malware be causing this, or could I have dissabled something in my system that is causing this. Currently I'm using EI and it works ok.

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Also, I don't have any of the programs installed that were mentioned in the article except for Winamp, but I haven't used that in months.

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Well forth times a charm. In safe-mode, I totally uninstall Firefox and deleted all bookmarks, add-ons, etc. Then I downloaded and installed FF and now it seems to be working fine. But that does make me wonder why it was necessary to go through the above and why a straight install didn't take care of the problem in the first place. Could it have been some malware targeting FF?