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Nightly crashing on start

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  • Last reply by Pistolfied

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Nightly crashes on startup and does not produce a crash report as of the latest update. It ran just fine yesterday and I have not made any changes to my system. I am running on Win 7 64 bit with all recent updates. I have also attempted to open Nightly in safemode using the shift key but it crashes before it is able to do so and have also tried using a different profile as well. Note: I am posting this through the Firefox Beta build and not Nightly. Attached is the windows crash report.

Nightly crashes on startup and does not produce a crash report as of the latest update. It ran just fine yesterday and I have not made any changes to my system. I am running on Win 7 64 bit with all recent updates. I have also attempted to open Nightly in safemode using the shift key but it crashes before it is able to do so and have also tried using a different profile as well. Note: I am posting this through the Firefox Beta build and not Nightly. Attached is the windows crash report.

Modified by Pistolfied

Chosen solution

Update: It seems that EMET 4.0 was actually the issue. I forgot to disable the mitigation settings under the application configurations but mistakenly assumed they would be disabled with everything else disabled. It appears the "deep hooks" option is the cause of the crashing in Nightly as of an update a couple days ago (I assume a Nightly update) and when disabled allows Nightly to start fine. I have had EMET 4.0 and Nightly for quite some time with no issues between the two before this crashing started to occur so it was because of an update somewhere that cause this.

Oddly, neither Aurora nor Firefox Beta are effected by the EMET deep hooks option and only Nightly.

The following is Microsoft's summarized explanation of what the deep hooks mitigation covers:

  • Deep hooks: EMET will protect critical APIs and the subsequent lower level APIs used by the top level critical API. For example, EMET will not only hook and protect kernel32!VirtualAlloc but also the related lower level functions, such as kernelbase!VirtualAlloc and ntdll!NtAllocateVirtualMemory.
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The information you provided is the crash dump, not the crash report. It would be great to have a crash report. Can you try these steps and see if you can produce one?

  1. Press the following shortcut to get a Run window: [Windows] + [R]. This should bring up a window that contains a text field.
  2. In that text field, enter %APPDATA% and press Enter. An explorer window should open.
  3. From that explorer window, double-click on the Mozilla folder, then double-click on Firefox and then on Crash reports. Double-click on submitted.
  4. Now, you should see a list of files that contain reports. Go to View > Arrange Icons by > Modified to get the most recent files at the top of the window.
  5. Open the most recent 5 files with a text editor and copy the IDs.
  6. Paste each ID with bp- into the reply window on the forums.

Thanks in advance!

You can find more information and troubleshooting steps in the Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly) article.


Can't produce a crash report? Don't worry.

Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. Please follow these steps:

Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.

  1. Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org and save the setup file to your computer.
  2. After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (click Exit from the Firefox or File menu).
  3. Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
    • Windows:
      • C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
      • C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
    • Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
    • Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
  4. Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
    1. Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
    2. Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.

More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.

WARNING: Do not run Firefox's uninstaller or use a third party remover as part of this process, because that could permanently delete your Firefox data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device!

Please report back to see if this helped you!

Thank you.

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The crashes don't produce any crash reports and I've already attempted to reinstall using that method.

Modified by Pistolfied

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Are you using a 32 bit Nightly build or a 64 bit Nightly build?

The 64 bit Nightly build for Windows is only generated to test for compilation errors and doesn't undergo all the tests that other builds get, so the risk that something goes wrong can be quite high.
So if you do use the 64 bit version then try the 32 bit version to see if you still have this problem.

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Been running the 32 bit version. I attempted downloading the installer again and reinstalling but it still crashes at the same point.

It's a problem somewhere with nightly I'm pretty sure as both my Aurora and Beta installs are working just fine.

Thought it might be EMET 4.0 that could be causing a problem (since it has caused some problems for other programs in the past) but I've disabled it entirely and the crashes still persist.

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Chosen Solution

Update: It seems that EMET 4.0 was actually the issue. I forgot to disable the mitigation settings under the application configurations but mistakenly assumed they would be disabled with everything else disabled. It appears the "deep hooks" option is the cause of the crashing in Nightly as of an update a couple days ago (I assume a Nightly update) and when disabled allows Nightly to start fine. I have had EMET 4.0 and Nightly for quite some time with no issues between the two before this crashing started to occur so it was because of an update somewhere that cause this.

Oddly, neither Aurora nor Firefox Beta are effected by the EMET deep hooks option and only Nightly.

The following is Microsoft's summarized explanation of what the deep hooks mitigation covers:

  • Deep hooks: EMET will protect critical APIs and the subsequent lower level APIs used by the top level critical API. For example, EMET will not only hook and protect kernel32!VirtualAlloc but also the related lower level functions, such as kernelbase!VirtualAlloc and ntdll!NtAllocateVirtualMemory.

Modified by Pistolfied