I’m hoping the XPCOM problem I was struggling with earlier today is now gone, and it looks like Firefox wasn’t the only culprit. At the root of the problem was Dorgem, which I use for my webcam. I’d installed a nightly build – should have known better than that…
I’m not giving FF a full pardon for this however, because the the bug manifested itself only when running Firefox with Dorgem in the background. Nothing else (not even IE7) triggered the issue, which tells me there could be an actual bug in FF in addition to the obvious one in the latest build of Dorgem. At least there might be room for improvement with the way FF behaves under some unexpected circumstances.
Update: Apparently, still not out of the woods. Shortly after writing the above, the network became unresponsive again and at shutdown the XPCOM error was back. I managed to get a screenshot of the alert box telling me that initializing the application failed
, which is all I get when trying to open Task Manager. Googling 0x0c0000017 gives no hits at this time.
I’d replaced Dorgem’s daily build with the latest stable, and was running it in the background. Currently I’m not running Dorgem in any incarnation, we’ll see how it goes.
21:35 Update: the problem persists.