Need Help In Resolving a Problem with Firefox Browser

[Archlute]

After hearing all of the great reviews of Firefox by PB users, I installed it last month. It has been great. It runs much faster, and crashes much less frequently, than IE. However, for about a week now I have been having a particular problem. When I click on the Firefox icon in the task bar (or through a desktop shortcut, or however) the cursor gives me the little spinning Vista circle that indicates the program is loading up, but then instead of the browser window opening the circle just stops spinning as if it were loaded, but nothing happens. Yesterday I attempted to uninstall and then reinstall the program, but I get a repeated error notice that the browser is open, and must first be shut down before it can be uninstalled.

So, basically, it seems that the browser is running invisibly, or at least the computer thinks that it is running, and I can neither use it nor uninstall it in order to fix the problem.

Any advice for fixing this problem?

 

[fredtgreco]

Adam,

Close Firefox. Then right click on the task bar. Select "Task Manager." Then select the "Processes" tab. Then select (left click) any process(es) that say "firefox.exe" (no quotes). Click the "End Process" button. That will close all instances of Firefox.

Then try the uninstall and reinstall.

 

[VictorBravo]

Funny, now that you mention it, Firefox has been taking much longer to start than it used to. It doesn't matter which machine I use. I just noticed it about three days ago. I wonder if there was some kind of automatic update, either in Windows or in Firefox, that made the changes.

I use IE and Firefox at the same time. For some reason, loading gmail and Google Docs routinely fails through IE 7 but works fine on Firefox. But IE is faster for everything else. So I keep them both open. Sometimes I even try Safari for Windows, but it just doesn't cut it compared to the other two.

 

[Archlute]

Thanks. That fixed it (I don't know why I didn't think of going to the task manager processes tab...).