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Trying to open Firefox and it wont open and I get an instance of wuauclt.exe running too.

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  • Last reply by Scribe

stephensteinke
stephensteinke
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When I go to open Firefox and I click on the Icon the icon highlights and then fades back to normal. the browser doesnt open and a new i instance of wuauclt.exe starts. The wuauclt.exe is running at about 3K of memory and Firefox at 2K of memory. sometimes they both go away, other times they dont. If I click on Firefox multiple times quickly I get many instances of each. However, still no Firefox. If I continue in quick succession, eventually Firefox opens.

Whats up and how do I fix it?

When I go to open Firefox and I click on the Icon the icon highlights and then fades back to normal. the browser doesnt open and a new i instance of wuauclt.exe starts. The wuauclt.exe is running at about 3K of memory and Firefox at 2K of memory. sometimes they both go away, other times they dont. If I click on Firefox multiple times quickly I get many instances of each. However, still no Firefox. If I continue in quick succession, eventually Firefox opens. Whats up and how do I fix it?

All Replies (1)

Scribe
Scribe
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Hi, wuauclt.exe is the Windows automatic update client, so shouldn't interact with Firefox, but may be using too many resources for Firefox to start. Try stopping it in the Task Manager. If that doesn't work, restart your PC.

If that doesn't work, try performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove your Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. This process does not remove your Firefox profile data (such as bookmarks and passwords), since that information is stored in a different location.

To do a clean reinstall of Firefox, please follow these steps: Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.

  1. Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from mozilla.org (or choose the download for your operating system and language from this page) and save the setup file to your computer.
  2. After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (or open the Firefox menu New Fx Menu and click the close button Close 29).
  3. Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
    • Windows:
      • C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
      • C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
    • Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
    • Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
  4. Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
    1. Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
    2. Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.

More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.

WARNING: Do not use a third party uninstaller as part of this process. Doing so could permanently delete your Firefox profile data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be easily recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device! See Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.

Please report back to say if this helped you!

Thank you.