Ubuntu 9.10 Firefox HANGS!

[Ernie 07]

Binary package hint: yelp

This failure can occur if Firefox has windows open, even if the user is not directly interacting with any of them. One failure occurred while interacting with Places, but it usually occurs during interaction with a Firefox window. This failure has not occurred when only a single Firefox window is open.

In 9.04, this could happen a few times a month. In 9.10, this failure seems to occur several times in a given week. When this failure occurs, power cycling or use of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will be required to reset the system. Unfortunately, power cycling is sometimes the only way to reset the system when this failure occurs.

My shared (XP/Ubuntu) data partition is formatted NTFS. That partition was trashed when this failure occurred before I had configured the X-window restart key sequence because a large 4GB file transfer was interrupted by power cycling. However, that data partition would probably have been trashed had it been formatted Ext3.

Lesson learned. Execute large file transfers using XP until this failure gets corrected.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Nov 7 12:36:23 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/yelp
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: yelp 2.28.0-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic-pae
SourcePackage: yelp
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic-pae i686
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:1906): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (gnome-settings-daemon:1906): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (nautilus:2004): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2027): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed