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Primary Password box keeps popping

  • 3 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 7 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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I do not have a primary password, I do not want a primary password, but the box keeps popping up. I cannot create one if I wanted to. I checked to make sure and the option to turn on the primary password it NOT activated. In fact, Firefox as of yesterday is no longer saving ANY passwords and dumped all it's previous information.

I do not have a primary password, I do not want a primary password, but the box keeps popping up. I cannot create one if I wanted to. I checked to make sure and the option to turn on the primary password it NOT activated. In fact, Firefox as of yesterday is no longer saving ANY passwords and dumped all it's previous information.

All Replies (3)

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What Primary password? You don't show what or where that message is coming from in a screenshot for others to verify what your seeing?

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If you haven't already, I suggest exiting out of Firefox and doing a normal shutdown and/or restart of Windows. The reason is to free up any file locks, complete any deferred updates, and resolve any temporary permission issues. The goal is to rule out any temporary file access problems before diving into possible data recovery.

Firefox uses two files to save and fill logins, which are saved in your currently active profile folder (Profiles - Where Firefox stores your bookmarks, passwords and other user data):

  • logins.json - contains saved login data, some of which is encrypted; to see the contents of this file, you can open it in a Firefox tab
  • key4.db - contains encryption keys used to decrypt user names and passwords in logins.json

It sounds like one or both of these files may have encountered a problem and the relationship has become broken.

You can move both files out of your current Firefox folder and let Firefox start from scratch on saving logins. But as for methods to recover what you had saved before, you may need to go to a backup (if you make regular backups) or we can suggest other data recovery options.

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This sounds like a problem with a corrupted key4.db file. You can check if you have a backup copy of logins.json and key4.db (those files need to match).

You can look a utility to browse System Restore points.