e-wot?

My Firefox was behaving badly. The pages were not loading properly. So I bit the bullet and tried to solve the problem. The solution turned out to be my Firefox profile. I guess it had become corrupted. Anyway, I fixed it. If you also have this problem, then here’s the solution on Windows XP. It’ll take an hour at least. Take a deep breath.

1. You’re going to delete your profile folder so first backup your current profile folder. You’ll need it later to copy your saved passwords (and as a ‘just in case’ measure). I copied mine to my desktop. You should find your profile folder here: C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXX.default
2. The XXXXXX.default folder (all letters and numbers followed by .default) is the one you should copy. Paste it onto your desktop (or somewhere easy to find).
3. Open your current Firefox and write down your addons and your search engines. I took screen shots of these and printed them out (press Print Screen – Prt Scr – it’s a keyboard key, top right on your keyboard). Save these ‘cos you’re going to have to re-install these manually later. Boring, but it’ll all be OK in the end. Promise.
4. Backup your bookmarks from within Firefox: bookmarks>organize bookmarks>Import & backup (dropdown)>Export html – save them to your desktop (or somewhere easy to find).
5. Download Firefox to your desktop (or somewhere easy to find).
6. Now you can uninstall your current version of Firefox (from control panel, uninstall programs).
7. Then delete your profile folder in C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXX.default (you saved it already right? Point 1 above?)
8. Install Firefox from your desktop (or wherever you saved it in point 5 above).
9. Reinstall all your fave addons and search engines manually from the lists or screen shots you made. This will take a while. Addons are here. And you can get the search engines by going to the sites or by going to Mycroft.
10. Now go to your old saved profile folder on your desktop (or wherever you saved it in point 1 above) and copy all your saved passwords by copying the following from your saved old profile folder on your desktop (or wherever you saved it in point 1 above): key3.db – signons.txt – signons2.txt  (source)
11. Paste these into (and overwrite those in) your new profile folder at C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXX.default
12. Import your old bookmarks from: bookmarks>organize bookmarks>Import & backup (dropdown)>Import html>from an html file…. browse to where you saved it and open it.
13. You might need to reorganise your bookmarks from within the Firefox Bookmarks Organizer so they work how they used to.
14. Now you should be happy. Firefox should be back to normal.

Well, that was long. But that’s what I did to fix the problems I was having with Firefox. What a relief.

I tried other approaches, but this was the solution that worked for me. I hope you have equal success.