Why does firefox keep locking up on me?

Bob Vaughan techie at tantivy.net
Mon Jan 14 22:55:43 PST 2008


I've been having a problem on one particular machine with Firefox locking up
on me, requiring a hard kill to get rid of it.

The problem is thus: Firefox starts normally, but as soon as I go to a
site that requires authentication, or any other form of user input,
It will freeze as soon as I start entering my userid.

For instance, I go to batboard.batlabs.com, and click Login. I start entering
my userid, and as soon as I enter the first character, Firefox freezes.
The number of characters entered varies, with del.icio.us, it didn't 
freeze until I clicked login after entering my userid/password.

I kill the window, but the process continues to sit there.

74199  ??  I      0:00.01 /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/firefox
74203  ??  I      0:00.01 /bin/sh /usr/local/lib/firefox/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lo
74207  ??  R      4:55.60 /usr/local/lib/firefox/firefox-bin

The machine is an old Dell Optiplex GX110 (p3/800 w 256mb), dual nVidia 
TNT2/64 cards, running 6.3-PRERELEASE (20080112), and Xorg 7.3_1. 
Firefox is 2.0.0.11. No extensions or wrappers.  

The problem has been ongoing for a while, but I think I first noticed it
around the time I upgraded Xorg from 7.0 to 7.1 (mid spetember). I tried 
rolling X back at the time, but that didn't help.

I have gone as far as reinstalling FreeBSD and X from scratch, but the 
problem still appears. It affects both the native and linux versions.

Starting from a clean slate, I installed 6.3-RC2, grabbed the ports distro, 
built and installed cvsup, and grabbed the latest sources, built world and 
kernel, and then Xorg 7.1, and both the FreeBSD native and Linux versions of 
Firefox.  The kernel is nothing special, just a stripped down version of 
GENERIC minus scsi controllers, firewire, pccard, extra NIC's, and i486_CPU.

The problem only occurs on this machine, not on my laptop, or my workstation
at home. It only seems to effect Firefox, Opera works fine.

Any ideas where to start looking?





-- 
               -- Welcome My Son, Welcome To The Machine --
Bob Vaughan  | techie @ tantivy.net 		  |
	     | P.O. Box 19792, Stanford, Ca 94309 |
-- I am Me, I am only Me, And no one else is Me, What could be simpler? --


More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list