All instances of Pale Moon Portable now crash on startup Topic is solved

[billdehaan]

I keep a couple of separate instances of Pale Moon portable for clean room usage. One for some financial banking web sites, one for all SSL extensions, one with no plugins, one for VPN, one for some backwards compatibility stuff, etc. This is useful for when plugins or add-ons conflict.

It works well, or did, until today. Today, I tried to run one of the instances (last run two days ago, on March 29). The startup logo appears, then nothing. Nothing in the task manager, nothing in any log I could see. I restored from last week's backup, and got the same result. I restored from last month's backup, it also crashed. I then tried a couple of other instances, and they all die silently.

It doesn't appear to be Pale Moon version specific. I tried upgrading to 26.1.1, and that started, gave me the "checking your add-ons" window, then it died.

My non-portable installation is working fine (I'm using it to enter this).

The Windows Event Log shows things like this:

Faulting application name: Palemoon.exe, version: 26.1.1.5896, time stamp: 0x56cb3be5
Faulting module name: mozjs.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x56cb2be9
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00013bb3
Faulting process id: 0x8a0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d18bbb60f6fa54
Faulting application path: J:\Apps\PaleMoon\Bin\Palemoon\Palemoon.exe
Faulting module path: J:\Apps\PaleMoon\Bin\Palemoon\mozjs.dll
Report Id: 9f184fb3-f7ae-11e5-9851-00241dd585e9

I've seen it die in mozjs.dll, and in C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll, depending on the version.

If I start a new, clean install of 26.1.1, that works, but of course, that means all settings, configuration data, and add-ons are lost. I'm thinking maybe a Windows Update or something, but I haven't installed anything new.

Has anyone else seen this, and/or have any ideas? If I have to re-install everything, it'll be a pain, especially since I made a point of keeping image backups that don't seem to be helping. At least looking in prefs.js, I see what many of the settings are.

Is there any easy way to import configuration/add-ons from an installation? I see a bunch of sqlite files in Profiles/Default; can those be brought in?

And is there any type of crash log I should be looking at? Going by date stamps, the only files I see with today's date (the date of any crash) are:

J:\Apps\PaleMoon\Bin\Palemoon\application.ini
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\addons.sqlite
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\addons.sqlite-journal
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\compatibility.ini
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\cookies.sqlite-shm
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\cookies.sqlite-wal
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\extensions.ini
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\extensions.sqlite
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\extensions.sqlite-journal
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\parent.lock
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\permissions.sqlite
J:\Apps\PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\prefs.js

The parent.lock file is 0 bytes, but all other stuff seems normal.

Any help appreciated.

[Moonchild]

It seems that the file compression applied to the portable doesn't play nice with either a recent windows update or some security software or a combination thereof.
I personally don't have any issues running the portable in any environment.

A workaround is to either replace the binaries with the ones from the zip-packed version of the desktop browser, or "unpack" the browsercomps.dll with UPX.

[billdehaan]

It seems that the file compression applied to the portable doesn't play nice with either a recent windows update or some security software or a combination thereof.

Firewall was one of the first things I thought of. I disabled the software - Agnitum Outpost - and tested with that prior to posting. It didn't have any impact.

I personally don't have any issues running the portable in any environment.

In the past, whenever I've had an issue with Pale Moon, I check the forums and invariably there's either been an announcement of a fix, or a lot of people discussing the issue. Since I didn't see anything, I figured it must be an interaction between Pale Moon and something else, but I had no idea what. And since I've not updated or installed anything in the past week, I wasn't sure where to look. One of the reasons I like the portable version is because it's usually immune to upgrade incompatibility hassles.

A workaround is to either replace the binaries with the ones from the zip-packed version of the desktop browser, or "unpack" the browsercomps.dll with UPX.

That did it. I used UPX on the browsercomp.dll, and now it starts again.

Thanks a lot for the help!