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I tried to upgrade from FF7 beta to FF7 and now I have no Firefox at all

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  • Last reply by alg24

alg24
alg24
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I was using the FF7 beta. When I saw that FF7 had been released, I downloaded and tried to install it, without uninstalling the beta first. That may have been a mistake. It got partway through the install process and then asked me to reboot the computer. After the reboot, my FF shortcut no longer worked ("Searching for firefox.exe"). I used another browser to download the installer again and ran it, only to be told that I needed to reboot my computer in order for a previous install to complete. I rebooted; no change. Attempting to remove the existing installation in Add/Remove Programs has not helped, though Mozilla Firefox is no longer listed there.

I'm using Windows XP and my standard user account doesn't have admin privileges. This hasn't been a problem for Firefox until, perhaps, now. I've tried running the installer from an admin account as well, with the same result.

Is there anything I can remove manually to fix this?

I was using the FF7 beta. When I saw that FF7 had been released, I downloaded and tried to install it, without uninstalling the beta first. That may have been a mistake. It got partway through the install process and then asked me to reboot the computer. After the reboot, my FF shortcut no longer worked ("Searching for firefox.exe"). I used another browser to download the installer again and ran it, only to be told that I needed to reboot my computer in order for a previous install to complete. I rebooted; no change. Attempting to remove the existing installation in Add/Remove Programs has not helped, though Mozilla Firefox is no longer listed there. I'm using Windows XP and my standard user account doesn't have admin privileges. This hasn't been a problem for Firefox until, perhaps, now. I've tried running the installer from an admin account as well, with the same result. Is there anything I can remove manually to fix this?

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alg24
alg24 Question owner
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OK... I found a Mozilla Support article - https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/The%20program%20must%20close%20to%20allow%20a%20previous%20installation%20attempt%20to%20complete - which says deleting xpicleanup.dat will solve the problem; but I guess that's out of date (or the presence of that file isn't the only cause of the bug), because there's no xpicleanup.* on my machine. However, elsewhere in this forum - https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/786890 - I found a suggestion to install the new version somewhere other than the default folder. I did that, and it worked; and it even preserved my bookmarks, add-ons and previously-opened tabs. (If anyone finds this while trying to solve their own upgrade/install failure: choose Custom rather than Standard install, and just change the suggested folder name.)

The only remaining sign of the problem is the icon in my Quick Launch area: if I try to use it to launch Firefox, I still get the error "Windows cannot open this file: firefox.exe.moz.delete". Having recorded that here for posterity, I'll be replacing the icon.