Firefox & Windows death

[Ferral]

I bought my new mainboard yesterday and got the hardware side of things up and running again nicely yesterday.

However, before a system restart Firefox updated and upon restarting I got the dark blue screen of death that is more commonly known to windows as a stop. Tried absolutely everything, swapping hardware out as I was getting a memory range error but it was a no go. Now I have used Firefox for a good while now and never encountered such a problem with it.

I can definately go with that causing the problem as it was the last thing Windows done before the restart. Everything else was stable until that update. I tried starting in safe mode to uninstall it but as soon as I clicked on the admin account the system restarted. No matter what I tried I either got the blue screen or the reset.

Main problem I encountered however was the fact that all my data and work was stored on the C partition of the hard disk and I couldn't retrieve it. So formatting was out of the question, 80 or so hours into Oblivion and I didn't fancy starting that one again ! Not forgetting my reviews and other saves were on there also. Trouble here was also (notice how I used was ! ) is that my c drive was (theres that was again ! ) FAT 32 and the d drive NTFS, so copying over in DOS was not a viable option as many know NTFS is not supported by DOS in any way and that partition wasn't recognised.

Thankfully, me thinking on my feet I managed to work around the problem and done a ghost image of the C drive onto the d partition and finally managed to do the format and changing c to NTFS. Used the ghost explorer and retrieved all my work and saves by dragging and dropping.

Has anyone else experienced any problems with the latest build of Firefox and is there an aplication that will do what I have just done but much easier ? Also can someone recommend me a new browser, I don't really like IE at all. I do like Firefox but am not risking it again for a while. Currently I am using Netscape 8.1 which is pretty good but the autofill is starting to get on my wick and it won't let me turn it off so I keep getting the yellow bar going on about passcards and the don't show again check box isn't working.

[=TcQi=]

That sounds pretty shocking! I too have been meaning to try a new browser. However IE 7 isn't ready yet :, which narrows the choice down to Opera 9. The widgets feature is pretty cool, but other than that I haven’t really got to grips with it yet….




=TcQi=

[MAdMaN]

I thoroughly recommend Opera 9. In my opinion it handles tabs better than Firefox, and it's the most compliant browser available. Version 9 also has built in Bittorrent support (though I still prefer to use Azureus).

[Steve]

How long had the system been running without being restarted prior to the Firefox installation and subsequent restart?

Firefox doesn't really mess with much in the way of system settings that I'm aware of.

[directhex]

How long had the system been running without being restarted prior to the Firefox installation and subsequent restart?

Firefox doesn't really mess with much in the way of system settings that I'm aware of.

indeed. sounds more like unrelated filesystem corruption

[Ferral]

It had literally been running for about 15 mins, it was quite bizarre I must admit. Mind you it hadn't been formatted in over a year which doesn't help.

At least its all sorted now. Just need to find a few apps that will help in the future if something like that happens again.

[mike_w]

As said, I wouldn't have thought Firefox would go anywhere near anything that could cause Windows to keel over. Personally, I use Seamonkey. The only downside is the lack of feed support (without extensions).

[Agent]

To be honest, if FF is crashing windows in such a fashion - you have an issue elsewhere.
Have you run memtest and all the other usual stress testing programs ?

[Ferral]

Yeah, done all the usual tests etc and everything is checking out ok.

I'm starting to think what has happed is when my motherboard went pop it has really badly corrupted the windows files and even a repair on windows itself couldn't fix it. Just so happened that Firefox was the last thing to do something on the system before it happened and I usually go for the last thing that happened when troubleshooting.

Once I got the new mainboard in and format was done my system has been working lovely since. Even the temperatures on the processor and videocard are lower which is no bad thing considering how hot its been round our way the past few weeks.