Re: [orca-list] My Firefox Is Stuck--How Do I Clear It?

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 10:59:14AM -0400, Janina Sajka wrote:
> I am suddenly finding myself unable to launch Firefox 3 on one of my
> machines. I get the message that says Firefox is already running but not
> responding, and I should close that session first and try again.
>
> This is certainly not so--the machine has been rebooted, yet this
> message comes up if I try to start FF.

When the message is displayed, try switching to a virtual terminal and
checking how many firefox processes there are
ps -C firefox-bin

If there are two or more, kill them all and try again.

I know the system has been rebooted; I'm wondering whether the desktop
environment might be trying to restart old sessions that are getting into
trouble somehow.

You could also try clearing /tmp, /var/tmp and any other obvious places in
case it looks there for temporary files. If that doesn't work, perhaps moving
your ~/.mozilla directory out of the way temporarily might help.

These are just suggestions. I have encountered this message myself, but only
when there are multiple firefox-bin processes running, easily fixed by killall
firefox-bin.