Dave-H

I know nothing about the technicalities of this issue. Only Xper has the necessary access to investigate it as the forum owner. Whatever the cause, and whether it's related to an issue with the board's server or not, it is apparently only affecting a very small number of people. That to me would logically indicate an issue with their particular setups, including their ISPs and geographical location. I am quite certain that if this could have been fixed by the MSFN administrators, it would have been.

This may help.

Because in this context, it is.

Registry recovery discussion moved here.

This is not the place to discuss and argue over disputes which are now ancient history. Please stay on-topic discussing current issues.

This is something you should really ask Shane the developer about on GitHub. It has already been asked about last year, and Shane didn't dismiss the idea, but it doesn't look as if it's progressed. https://github.com/win32ss/supermium/discussions/1272

Thanks. Hopefully those issues can be addressed in the release version, although it will still be Chromium 144 of course.

It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion to you, to consider whether your issue might be being caused by trying to run too much simultaneously on an underresourced machine. Please respect this.

Yes, I've seen that myself a few times, it looks as if it hasn't posted, but it actually has! Duplicates deleted.

We've now had two instances of multiple apparently identical posts from two different users. Is this a forum glitch?

New version 144 now testing.

@reboot12 @Dietmar Wow! I'm so pleased to see this. I've been in some very long troubleshooting exercises on MSFN in the past myself, but never one as long as this one! I take my hat off to both of you for sticking with it and never giving up. Congratulations to you both. Cheers, Dave.

No.

That was nearly a year ago. I'm now using Supermium 138, which spoofs itself as 142, by design, but is definitely actually 138. It's certainly no older than that, and I never accepted the claim that the Supermium developer was deliberately falsifying the Chromium version it was using. I have never had any redirection issues with MSFN.

Don't worry, you're fine. This sort of thing is exactly what this forum is all about!

I agree as a general off-topic observation that while you do, of course, need to have a general awareness of security and privacy issues when working online, there's really no need to be paranoid about it.

We all know where this is going to go. Please get back on topic.

Edge appears to be the same, so I guess it's a Chromium thing?

Back on topic please guys.

Thanks very much for the explanation!

Thanks @roytam1. Yes, I'm aware that the runtime version I'm using isn't an official XP-compatible version. It was brought to my attention by @Monroe in another thread here. I think it was developed unofficially to help with some games which would not otherwise work on XP. Presumably, as I've now found, it can also cause compatibility problems with some other programs! I will probably keep it installed as a system runtime, but be aware that if any other program now fails to run, that might be the cause. Hopefully all I will need to do then, as with Firefox, is put compatible versions of the necessary runtime DLLs in the program's folder.

OK, it's fixed! The portable version worked fine, and in fact if I ran the firefox.exe in the portable version's program folder, rather than firefoxportable.exe, it opened fine using my normal Firefox profile! So, I started comparing the two installations, and found that some DLLs in my Firefox program folder appeared to have been disabled by renaming 'DLL' to 'D~L'. That's my normal way of disabling a file, changing the middle character of the extension to '~'. Why I had done that is lost in the mists of time in this case, but one disabled DLL file stood out, and that was msvcp140.dll, which is a C++ Runtime file of course. That reminded me that I had recently updated my C++ 2015-2019 Runtime to 14.29.30139, following a recommendation elsewhere on MSFN. Thinking perhaps this could be the issue, I simply renamed the msvcp140.dll file in the Firefox folder back to normal, and everything came good! So, I guess the new system runtime file versions may not actually be compatible with all programs, so I will now be on the lookout for any other seldom-used programs which no longer work. Thanks everyone for the help as always! Cheers, Dave.

No, Firefox was not open when I uninstalled Malwarebytes. I hardly ever use it now. Thanks for the link to the portable version, I will give it a try and report back.

OK, I tried disabling the current Firefox profile (by renaming its folder and making a new empty folder with the same name). Firefox still didn't start, with the same immediate error. I think that means the issue is nothing to do with anything in the profile.

There is no noticeable increase in startup time with 22.03.05 on my machine, it seems perfectly normal as it was before Panda was installed, so I can only assume that it just doesn't run well on your particular hardware.