Hello all I do fall into the newbie section so I appreciate the help... I can't open Firefox or Thunderbird as it tells me my default user is still running I am sure there is an easy solution to this but I am not the best when it comes to fix's....
I think I just have to close or unlock this but not sure how so if you can help me in a fool proof way That would be great.... Thanks in advance....

go to a terminal and type in ps -ef. Do you see any instances of firefox or thunderbird running. if so then kill those. I have had this happen to me before and it was due to so many instances of it up and running.

Last time I had this, I had to delete the profile. Then I just started firefox and it creates a new one.

The only snag I had was if this happened, it would kill any bookmarks etc that I'd stored.

To do this (presuming KDE desktop), konqueror>/home/user (thats you!)>view hidden files (if you haven't already got them showing). So then, /home/user>.mozilla(notice the . before mozilla, that indicates it's a hidden file)>firefox>xxxxxxxxxx.default(the xxx bit, is specific to your system I believe) and you can either delete the xxxxxxxxx.default or you can open it and have a look at the stuff.

the bookmarks.xml file is what may (or not) have any bookmarks saved so you'd have to rename it to something like bookmarks.xml.old (place it somewhere else i.e. out of the original directory - I just used to dump it on the desktop. Then you can delete the xxxxxxxx.default profile so when firefox restarts it recreates a new one and you can copy the bookmarks back to the new profile folder - don't forget to swap the names/copy the file to the original bookmarks.xml location otherwise you still can't see the original ones.

I'm sure that theres a better way of doing this - like I understand that it's (theoretically) just a case of deleting the lock file, but I don't know where you'd find that (my system just shows it as a link, not an actual file - which might be in /usr/lib or wherever the main firefox files are located). I just found that the quickest way of sorting this (for firefox) was the quickest.

Sorry, don't know if this will sort thunderbird as well.

It may well be that it's just as easy as doing the stuff that jstephens84 suggested (hey try those things first - if it works, then all power to you. I know my way works but unless remember to save any data files, then you will have to start over with bookmarking and any other customisation that you may have - sorry, don't know about any extensions/themes etc etc.

regards

John

Inside your Mozilla profile (as detailed in the bove post) you will see a file with a padlock on it - delete the file and Firefox will work.

look for the file ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/lock
if firefox isnt running, delete the lock file and it should start up fine.
same goes for thunderbird, just replace .mozilla with .thunderbird

I havn't had time to try these tips yet (#$%*'n work) but I will here tomorrow thatnks for the help.. Hope It works. HeHe