Comment 5 for bug 252151

I have been encountering this bug too. It happens at least since Firefox 3.0b5 was included in Hardy and is still present in Intrepid. I think it already happened with FF2 in Gutsy, although I'm not completely sure of it.

What happens is that "sometimes", quitting Firefox doesn't kill the firefox process, which then starts to eat up CPU power. When trying to restart FF, there's a message stating that it's already running.

I haven't been able to find a pattern in the crashes : no particular website or technology (e.g. Flash) is involved. It seems random.

Also, as it happened to me again two days ago, I've started to run Firefox exclusively from a terminal to see if I could get an error message that could explain the crash : I got the problem again today and no info. When quitting FF, I came back to the terminal with no prompt. Simply using ctrl+C killed the process and came back to the prompt.

I there a way to have infos about what happens with a process in that kind of case ?