09.11.2011

This morning Firefox on one my Windows XP SP3 machines decided to upgrade itself to the latest 8.0 version. All well and good, but after the upgrade Firefox worked for couple of minutes and then crashed. Every subsequent attempt to open Firefox resulted in immediate crash. First tried couple of obvious things:

• Start Firefox in Safe Mode
• Restart PC
• Reinstall Firefox

None of these actions helped. Then Started Windows in Safe Mode and Firefox was running happily without any issues. This made it pretty clear that problem was caused by a third party software. Standard Firefox add-ons had to be ruled out as they would not be loaded in Firefox safe mode.

Restarted PC again and checked what processes are starting automatically with Windows. Suspicion immediately fell on RoboForm Password Manager, which runs in a system tray and also attaches to Firefox.
Checked Roboform website (using IE obviously) and surely RoboForm on a PC was couple of versions behind. Upgraded RoboForm to the latest version and issue was resolved.

If you have the same problem, but don’t use RoboForm, check for other software which runs as a standalone application and also integrates with Firefox.