Tag: glitch

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.

So far I’ve tried disabling the DOM Inspector and Talkback in Firefox and also Windows XP’s Webclient service (which has been cited among others as a possible culprit of the XPCOM Event Receiver problem) – none of this has helped.

For me the problem seems to be a tad more serious than for others reporting this, since just by running Firefox for a while the system eventually loses all networking capabilities and refuses to open the Task Manager (I’ll try grabbing a screenshot, of the alert box notifying about the failure, if I can the next time it appears, although it is in Finnish), at which point the only working solution is to reboot – which, of course, is when I’m greeted with the XPCOM not terminating properly nag.

The strange thing is, if I open up the Task Manager and leave it lurking on the side while FF hoses the system, from there it looks like there’s nothing alarming going on – no single process is eating up all the resources. The only abnormality is the firefox.exe process not terminating when I close the application window.

Right now I’m running Firefox in Safe-mode and with anti-phishing disabled in addition to all the stuff mentioned above. I’m hoping I’ll come across something that works, because otherwise I’ll have to switch to Opera or something, and I’d really, really hate to do that.