ohland
03-04-2015, 11:27 PM
After upgrading to Firefox 36 recently, I've enjoyed a zombie process after the screen saver is activated after inactivity. What is left under Task Manager is firefox.exe *32 (244K), which is supposedly a 32 bit process under WOW. I can't kill it under task manager, either with kill process or kill process tree. Killtask /IM firefox.exe /F (also tried /PID wxyz in place of /IM firefox.exe) replies that the task has been terminated, but Task Manager shows that it isn't. Tried /T to kill child processes. (32 bit under Win 7 64 bit? Odd...)
Why the bother? Firefox uses a 0 byte file parent.lock to keep track of how many instances are running. So if that file isn't deleted on exit, Firefox thinks one instance is running already, so it won't load. Profiles.ini is another issue, tried doing an explicit path to the default profile, but that also locks up as well. Just tried setting
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=0 (it was 1)
Let's see how this works.
PS. To those confused about what all this means, as long as the zombie process of firefox *32 is running, FireFox will refuse to come up until the firefox.exe *32 process is either killed (hahaha) or you hard reboot your system. VERY annoying. Oh, forgot, as long as the zombie process is running, Parent.lock and profiles.ini are locked, as they are in use by... firefox.exe *32.
:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:
Why the bother? Firefox uses a 0 byte file parent.lock to keep track of how many instances are running. So if that file isn't deleted on exit, Firefox thinks one instance is running already, so it won't load. Profiles.ini is another issue, tried doing an explicit path to the default profile, but that also locks up as well. Just tried setting
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=0 (it was 1)
Let's see how this works.
PS. To those confused about what all this means, as long as the zombie process of firefox *32 is running, FireFox will refuse to come up until the firefox.exe *32 process is either killed (hahaha) or you hard reboot your system. VERY annoying. Oh, forgot, as long as the zombie process is running, Parent.lock and profiles.ini are locked, as they are in use by... firefox.exe *32.
:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn: