Firefox not running : unable to load XPCOM > (was Re:)

[Don Vogt]

> >>> Hopefully this will solve your problems. :)
> >> ----
> >> probably but to be honest, I haven't been tracking
> this problem but
> >> generally, you can just nuke the file,
> >>
> ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR_SALTED_PROFILE/pluginreg.dat and it
> will be
> >> rebuilt on the next Firefox startup.
> >>
> >> and more to the point, you can temporarily move
> your whole ~/.mozilla
> >> folder to another name and it will be created
> again which is a very
> >> quick way to test if something in your
> .mozilla/firefox directory is
> >> causing a problem. Don't nuke this folder unless
> you are prepared to
> >> lose your bookmarks, passwords, etc.
> >>
> >
> > Both of these were among the first things suggested to
> the OP. :) But
> > they didn't make any difference. I think this is one
> of the problems
> > with nspluginwrapper, since its installation is
> system-wide it is very
> > difficult to isolate when it malfunctions. All the
> usual troubleshooting
> > methodology starts failing.
> 
> Actually everything looked fine on Don's system.
> 
> > Thankfully Don was very observant and picked up on the
> error message in
> > the terminal. Otherwise even knowing that its
> installed would have been
> > difficult to guess over emails. Lets hope the problem
> is isolated now,
> > and can be resolved.
> 
> I agree the best option is to get rid of nspluginwrapper:
> Don is not
> using it at all and it triggers an error (perfect match!).
> If it
> doesn't work, then I would focus in outputs from
> package-cleanup to
> inspect suspicious packages installed (there is some livna
> related
> packages and others (fc10/11) that can lead to confusion
> or
> misconfiguration)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> David
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> -- 



I tried renaming ~/.mozilla and starting firefox, with no success.
I believe that, since firefox never starts, it will not rewrite the ~/.mozilla directory. 
When I enter firefox in a terminal, it comes back with "couldn't load XPCOM" in about a second, so it isn't getting very far.
 I tried to clean things up a bit using package-cleanup but didn't do much. I did clean out old kernels and kernel-devel files. That didn't solve the problem.
I am not sure I mentioned it before, but I installed another, newer, version of firefox. It is a different version , from mozilla.org, that installs in my home directory instead of on the system. So far that works fine in parallel with the yum installed version (which still doesn't work).
I have attached new versions of the output of package-cleanup --orphans and --leaves, just in case I changed anything.
I believe I have tried everything that has been suggested, with no success. I intend to putter with the package-cleanup files next.
 I am putting this on the back burner now because:
1. I have a working firefox.
2 fc13 is coming soon and I need to do a complete re-install anyhow. I have been using preupgrade with great success since fc9 but things are getting messy. My system is a mess with 3 hard drives, grub boot record installed on /dev/sda and the grub files on sda8, but I run fc12 from /dev/sdc7. I have two versions of ubuntu, puppy, and another fc12 installed and keeping up to date is just too complicated.
I will post if I find the answer and I would still appreciate any help. Otherwise I consider this thread closed. 
Thanks for the help. You guys are great.
Don



      
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: orphans1.txt
Url: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20100405/e32e77ca/attachment.txt 
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: leaves1.txt
Url: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20100405/e32e77ca/attachment-0001.txt