Hi jeffd, and the rest of you. I will try to describe this phenomenon, and hopefully you will understand what I'm talking about and be able to tell me how to fix it.

Just before I left for a week, I scanned my system with my (fully up to date) arsenal: AVG, Adaware, AdsGone, Spybot S&D, AntiVir. Found nothing (not an unusual occurrence - I'm always clean.) Left for a week. No one home but the dust bunnies (they don't use machines, they inhabit them, though mine's pretty clean right now since I just put in a new hdd and some RAM a few weeks ago) and the dozen plants in the bathtub of water.

Get home today and here's the scenario after boot up: Zone Alarm has NOTHING approved for access (EXTREMELY odd, since I didn't "clean house" before I left). When I open a FF (1.0.2) window, I can open any number of tabs, and can open from the bookmarks in a new tab, but when I try to open a new tab from an icon on my quick launch bar, I get the following message: There was a problem sending the command to the program. Accompanied by a red dot with a white X, and in the title bar of the dialog box is the web address the quick launch icon belongs to.

I've shut down and restarted twice. I've rescanned my machine (finishing AVG right now). No one was in here (there are telltales - believe me, no one was in here.) There's no evidence that my machine was remotely started (not a real threat, but I did consider it.) The only other oddity over the week is that someone in whose address book is one of my own domain email addys has a worm and I'm getting bounces for emails I of course didn't try to send *sigh* (I'm assuming it's either my cousin or one of the other ditzes I know).

Any ideas, guys? BTW, FF is my default browser, and I haven't used IE except to check locally hosted sites under development for several months. I haven't installed anything since the hdd install and RAM upgrade.
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Update: uninstalled AOL (was going to anyway - no longer need it as backup) and Firefox, reinstalled Firefox. No change in the gremlin.... still get the error message....
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No ideas, huh? Well, me either. Still have the problem, nothing else is wonky, I have NO CLUE. *sigh*
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vkaryl, sorry, I completely missed your post, don't know how that happened, the 'view latest' didn't show it. More gremlins?

Why don't you try installing Firefox 1.0.3, which fixes a security hole anyway, and check back?

Are you using themes? If you are, try reverting to the original default firefox theme and see how that works. The graphic parts are parts of the themes, and sometimes the themes themselves get messed up.

Also, try creating a new profile if you haven't done that already. My guess is something in the themes/extensions got messed up somehow, a glitch, depends on what you had installed.

I had one issue with a client with Firefox, it was resolved by installing the new version, my suspicion in that case was that the last version had begun to install the new update then the computer was turned off right in the middle of the process.

Let us know what happens, don't want to have any problems with Firefox.

PS, I'm collecting my favorite new distros and will send you a care package one of these days with some, ubuntu gnome and kde, mepis, beatrix, kanotix, they've all just released, or are releasing, new versions.

<update>I just did an update of my extensions, I think it's the new 0.9.3 version of the web developer toolbar, that's my guess anyway, my firefox isn't working right either anymore. First time I've seen Chris Pederick make a mistake.

<update 2>It was the user agent switcher, the 0.6.5 update requires an uninstall of the previous version before you install the new one, grrrr. That really messed it up until I figured that one out.

Anyway, start firefox in safe mode, that's available if you go to your start menu, programs, mozilla firefox, start in safe mode, then your browser will work fine, it's just a matter of figuring out which of those extensions or themes is causing the problem.


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Hi jeffd - I did install the new FF after all this started, didn't fix it. I didn't do a new profile (BAD girl!) I'll probably uninstall and do a reinstall with a new profile first. I don't have the UA switcher installed. I do have the WebDev toolbar. I also use the "lila" theme. I'll return to basic theme, then repost later.

BTW, this is also affecting functionality in IE. Normally if I have IE open at a site, I can click on one of the quick launch icons and have the site it refers to open in the same IE window that's already open. I'm getting the same error message when I attempt that.

Opera: exactly the same situation. I'm tempted to think that windows is whacked somewhere (registry probably). Y'know what? I think I'll restore my computer to before I left first....

Back later (oh, I'll be looking forward to the "care package" too!)
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try uninstalling zonealarm and reinstalling.
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I'd do what Mike advises, except it's a pain, since you have to redo all your firewall settings, I've never seen zonealarm do that, but you never know.

If this is a cross browser issue it's not related to any one browser.

That might be tricky to pinpoint in that case.
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while it may be a pain, all of your old settings are set to disallow anyway. so you might as well...
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I used System Restore to go back to the date I installed AOL. Before doing so, I copied to my laptop all the downloads and website tweaks I'd done since then.

Fixed. Still weird, but fixed. Now I have to get the remnants of AOL out of the registry *sigh*. I've GOT to find a better backup solution for ISP problems!

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I won't mess with ZA until I see if I have other "gremlins"....
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pick up one of those usb hard drive backups.
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