This has gone beyond a joke. I was prepared for the beta's and possibly the release candidates to crash on me, but the final release is now crashing as well. In addition to the above problems, sometimes if I hit the website on the toolbar, instead of crashing, the app just freezes, me needing to go to the task manager to kill it off.

The thing is that I'm writing this from 4.0b1 and it's rock solid. There is NONE of this continual crashing on start-up. This is an incredible blight on my experience with firefox, a usage that dates well back into the early days of Netscape Navigator. Someone has got to have an idea as to what's going wrong here or can give me a hint as to how to debug the problem - I do have about 20 years of technical software development behind me, so I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty.

It now looks like this could be to do with some sort of corruption in my profile. I have firefox installed on my c:\ drive and the profile within my backed up data directory on my d:\. This is crashing 'til the cows come home. 8 crashes on trying to start the thing up is not uncommon.

I had a look in the profile and there are a series of files that have the appendage "corrupt", places.sqlite-*.corrupt, where * ranges from nothing to 9. With this in mind I then fired up firefox in profilemanager mode and created a new, untouched profile. When I start up firefox with this profile, it starts first time, every time. Any idea as to how I can "debug" my profile to see what's causing the crashing?

Further to the previous post, I use db's like firebird and oracle which have third party apps, such as TOAD and IBExprt, that allow me to view the db tables, amongst other things. Does anyone know if sqlite have something similar?

Haven't had a chance to dig into the db tables yet but there is something which is a bit weird. I've been led to believe, from web searches/forums/etc, that the one profile can be used by both a Windows install and also a Linux install. With this in mind, I have a machine that dual boots XP and Gentoo Linux.

I have the XP disk readable from the Linux install and the Linux install of Firefox gets its profile from the XP disk. When I start up Firefox in Linux, which is reading the XP partition for the common profile, there are no problems whatsoever. Firefox starts up fine, first time, every time. On the other hand, when I attempt to fire up the XP install of Firefox, I get the problem of the continual crashes after start up.

Considering this is the 5th comment I've made regarding this problem, along with the couple of Crash Reports that have been sent back to Head Office, and having heard nothing from these support volunteer superheroes, I'm just wondering if anyone is actually reading this?

Well, after all that, it looks like it was the fault of the video device driver. Totally unrelated to trying to track down this problem, I hadn't updated my video driver in a while so I did. Next thing I know, Firefox is starting up normally again, no more crashes.

I must say, this was weird. The fact that one profile caused the crash whilst another profile didn't suggested to me that it was a problem with the actual profile. No feedback/direction from any of the support volunteer superheroes also didn't make it easy to try and track down the cause of the problem.

So in closing, if you have this problem, try updating your video device driver.

I got the same solution. After upgrading my nvidia graphic driver the firefox 4 and 5 run fine.