[Solved] Palemoon instability since v19

[Moonchild]

Please check the pale moon plugins. it seems you have a daemon tools shel extension dll loaded in your pale moon process which makes me think you may have an issue with plugins not properly releasing. and in fact it's not a hang, since whatishang doesn't show anything, it just won't terminate the process (not an application hang) as it's waiting for a proper shutdown of a component.

Disable any plugins in the browser you don't need enabled, and try again.

[drivetheory]

interesting... I see what you are talking about in that screenshot, DTShl64.dll
how could it get there?

i restarted palemoon to have a look
at the moment, that dll file isn't loaded, and as the screenshot shows, it's not listed as a plugin (nor is it an extension)


EDIT:
I "think" i just found how it it's getting there.... seems it's a problem with the Daemon Tools name space extension (even though i have it disabled...), when i save a file from the web browser to the pc that DLL gets loaded into the palemoon process

ideas why it doesn't affect other 64-bit EXEs i save files from (photoshop, opera, etc) but only palemoon?

[Moonchild]

ideas why it doesn't affect other 64-bit EXEs i save files from (photoshop, opera, etc) but only palemoon?

Pale Moon doesn't work like other applications. In many respects it's event driven, and uses a lot of "internal communication" because of the way it is built on top of the Xul library (it's a just very advanced xulrunner application, all in all). If an external hooked-in component doesn't respond to a shutdown request, the application can keep waiting on the nonresponsive component (while the visual part has already unloaded) and the application never shuts down as a result.

You could say it's more courteous in how it handles component shutdown by waiting for components and not forcing a shutdown. It's odd anyway that the shell extension gets hooked in even when it should be disabled, so I gather part of the problem at least is a half-initialized library on DTs behalf.

All of this is educated guesswork, i may be wrong, but it seems the most likely reason.

[drivetheory]

fascinating explanation, very interesting, always love obtaining new knowledge to enhance my understanding of these things, i truly appreciate it.

anyhow, i've had daemon tools shell extension disabled since i last posted.

palemoon just decided to hang the same way it has before.

the notable things of interest that i did while using palemoon was drag n drop shortcuts from address bar to the desktop, as well as open a .torrent file from the brower straight to utorrent (Black Mesa half life mod, if it matters)

attached is a screencap of the current threads of the palemoon process.

i thank you for humoring me through this process of troubleshooting this curious quirk that keeps happening to me.

also, feel free to recommend any other more useful tasks i can do to gather more info on palemoon when it hangs like this, got windbg (and ads) and can download any other tool that might be useful, whatever i can do to get better information to solve this problem i'm all for. should i just run ads.exe on palemoon when it hangs or windbg.exe or what? what can i do to be more effective in solving this problem?

please excuse my ignorance, just brainstorming, but is there a way to log/debug the shutdown requests palemoon sends to the hooked in components to see which ones reply/shutdown/etc?

[drivetheory]

palemoon hung when i tried to close it after posting above.... seems the problem all relates to palemoon user driven file system interaction (downloading file, uploading file, drag n drop shortcut, etc). just an observation

[Moonchild]

Both your latest hang reports show it's hanging in JSD_GetValueForObject at the same address.
Please grab http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/what_is_hang.html and report on what it says about the hang? Process explorer really doesn't give the details I'm interested in.

[drivetheory]

my apologies, forgot about nirsoft's whatishang.

[dark_moon]

And if you use process monitor and look which operations make problems?

[drivetheory]

... i dragged and dropped the favicon from the address bar to my desktop, overwrote the existing file.
closed palemoon, re-opened palemoon, couldn't since it was hung, took some screenshots, opened google chrome, added this post.

whatishang doesn't show anything (again)

i have a 75MB 7z file of the memory dump created with ads.exe i can send it to you if you want to see what is at that address.

attached windbg to pm and it took a couple stabs in the dark:

Code: Select all

0:011> ddp 0x3a8180
00000000`003a8180  00000000
00000000`003a8184  00000000
00000000`003a8188  0fcef000 00000000`384adf93
00000000`003a818c  00000000
00000000`003a8190  fffffff0
00000000`003a8194  00000000
00000000`003a8198  e757a8a5
00000000`003a819c  000007fe
00000000`003a81a0  003a8660 00000000`003a8860
00000000`003a81a4  00000000
00000000`003a81a8  e757991e
00000000`003a81ac  000007fe
00000000`003a81b0  003a8650 00000000`003a87b8
00000000`003a81b4  00000000
00000000`003a81b8  003a8680 00000000`05c7fffd
00000000`003a81bc  00000000
00000000`003a81c0  003a8660 00000000`003a8860
00000000`003a81c4  00000000
00000000`003a81c8  003a82f0 39353838`2d6f7369
00000000`003a81cc  00000000
00000000`003a81d0  003a850a 87f80000`07fef62d
00000000`003a81d4  00000000
00000000`003a81d8  003a8560 00000000`003a8650
00000000`003a81dc  00000000
00000000`003a81e0  e7579743
00000000`003a81e4  000007fe
00000000`003a81e8  ffffffff
00000000`003a81ec  ffffffff
00000000`003a81f0  10146360 2d393538`384f5349
00000000`003a81f4  00000000
00000000`003a81f8  003a8699 00000000`00003a87
00000000`003a81fc  00000000
0:011> dda 0x3a8180
00000000`003a8180  00000000
00000000`003a8184  00000000
00000000`003a8188  0fcef000 "..J8"
00000000`003a818c  00000000
00000000`003a8190  fffffff0
00000000`003a8194  00000000
00000000`003a8198  e757a8a5
00000000`003a819c  000007fe
00000000`003a81a0  003a8660 "`.:"
00000000`003a81a4  00000000
00000000`003a81a8  e757991e
00000000`003a81ac  000007fe
00000000`003a81b0  003a8650 "..:"
00000000`003a81b4  00000000
00000000`003a81b8  003a8680 "...."
00000000`003a81bc  00000000
00000000`003a81c0  003a8660 "`.:"
00000000`003a81c4  00000000
00000000`003a81c8  003a82f0 "iso-8859-1.isInternal"
00000000`003a81cc  00000000
00000000`003a81d0  003a850a "-..."
00000000`003a81d4  00000000
00000000`003a81d8  003a8560 "P.:"
00000000`003a81dc  00000000
00000000`003a81e0  e7579743
00000000`003a81e4  000007fe
00000000`003a81e8  ffffffff
00000000`003a81ec  ffffffff
00000000`003a81f0  10146360 "ISO8859-1"
00000000`003a81f4  00000000
00000000`003a81f8  003a8699 ".:"
00000000`003a81fc  00000000

EDIT:
will fire up procmon and let it sit in the background

[drivetheory]

interestingly enough, i am noticing that instead of palemoon opening my homepage all the time it instead on random occasion opens the last page i had open, not sure if that's related ot...

[drivetheory]

it hung again, lol.

mind you i successfully opened pale moon, dragged and dropped the favicon from the address bar to the desktop and subsequently closed palemoon a couple times with no problems.
then all the sudden on like test 4 or 5 of doing the same thing over and over it decided to hang...

sysinternals process monitor capture attached for the hang.

[Moonchild]

In the meantime I've researched the particular function but don't see anything odd -- and bugzilla doesn't have any report of this particular issue either.
"random" behavior is never good, either so I think you may have some database corruption in your profile. At this point I would suggest you perform a profile reset, go to Help -> troubleshooting information, and use "Reset Pale Moon".

[drivetheory]

7-zipped my palemoon profile
reset palemoon

EDIT: (an hour+ later)
decided to create new profile instead of resetting the existing profile (not a fan of the folder naming system)
imported old bookmarks HTML file
re-installed and configured addons.

will post back when next hang occurs

[drivetheory]

LOL this is hilarious

i opened & closed palemoon a couple times, then opened it, dbl clicked the url file on my desktop. it opened this thread to page 1, clicked page 3, posted reply, dragged and dropped the favicon in the address bar back to desktop, overwrote existing icon. closed pale moon...

reopened palemoon, nope, hung.....

[dark_moon]

Do you try the windows safemode? Cause you have many processes (101 at your screen) open, which is a lot.

Because non of us have the problems you have.

[drivetheory]

so, palemoon has closed and restarted another dozen or so times with no problems what so ever.


yeah, i know im the only one with this problem...

[megaman]

so, palemoon has closed and restarted another dozen or so times with no problems what so ever.

There are so many things that we pin-point, but need to know a well starting point.
You could have some running programs that interfere, antivirus perhaps?
Your antivirus might still start on SafeMode, but then we can find the culprits a bit easier.

[Moonchild]

I understand it's frustrating, but there has to be a reason that this occurs on your system. How quickly after dragging and dropping are you closing the browser session? Almost immediately? What if you drag and drop it to a regular folder instead of your desktop?

EDIT: since it's irregular, have you more extensively tested this with Firefox as well or not?

EDIT2: Did you make sure not to use any add-ons or plugins when testing?

[drivetheory]

You could have some running programs that interfere, antivirus perhaps?
Your antivirus might still start on SafeMode, but then we can find the culprits a bit easier.

oh i know, im sure some other program and palemoon are not getting along, and it all started sometime around when palemoon went to version 19.
could be an update to another program that occured around the same time, could be something that changed in palemoon with version 19... could be a combination of the 2

wouldn't booting into safe mode be redundant? that just removes almost all other 3rd party apps from running which, if palemoon does run without problems still doesn't tell us anything we don't already know- that a 3rd party app and palemoon are not getting along?

as well, what about WOW64? think running the 32-bit version of palemoon instead of the 64-bit version be a useful step towards troubleshooting?

also, being that this is a new PC with new hardware and new associated software, and since the problem occurred on my old PC wouldn't it also stand to reason that the software conflict is a resident piece of software/shell extension that existed on both systems?...

[megaman]

wouldn't booting into safe mode be redundant? that just removes almost all other 3rd party apps from running which, if palemoon does run without problems still doesn't tell us anything we don't already know- that a 3rd party app and palemoon are not getting along?

as well, what about WOW64? think running the 32-bit version of palemoon instead of the 64-bit version be a useful step towards troubleshooting?

also, being that this is a new PC with new hardware and new associated software, and since the problem occurred on my old PC wouldn't it also stand to reason that the software conflict is a resident piece of software/shell extension that existed on both systems?...

We can pin-point programs that do start-up.
Coming from an old PC, you would know what programs run on a frequent basis.

Update your graphic drivers to the latest.
Test by disabling your antivirus, just to test for that moment.
Check programs that start-up, or any other security program.
Disable plugins or extensions.
Okay, you can try the Browser's Safe Mode, rather than to waste time restarting the PC.
Someone else might have information on this WOW64, I am running the 64-bit version and it doesn't show up on my Task Manager.