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I keep getting a "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" message and firefox does not open. WHat is wrong and how do I fix?

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  • 107 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I uninstalled Firefox from my computer, then I reinstalled it and tried to run it, but this message appeared, "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" and Firefox does not open at all.

I uninstalled Firefox from my computer, then I reinstalled it and tried to run it, but this message appeared, "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" and Firefox does not open at all.

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hello davidrusso71, press windows-key+R on your computer and open %appdata%\Mozilla\ - an explorer window should come up, in there rename the folder labelled "Firefox" to something like oldFirefox. on the next start of firefox this should lead to a new profile being created...

you might want to import some of your old data into the new profile afterwards: Recovering important data from an old profile

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You can check if you have a profiles.ini file and if found then delete this file to make Firefox create a new default profile.


You can use the Profile Manager to create a new profile.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over the problem.

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Omgoodness. I don't understand any of this. What the heck are "charms"? Is there anyone will to give me real time help with this? Thanks

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Hi livinginvt

Could you please start a new thread for your question instead of posting in an existing thread?

Then you can provide more information like your operating system and installed extensions and installed plugins.


Note that this error message is caused by a problem with the profiles.ini file that has a profile marked as Default=1 that is no longer present.