FF2 opens only a blank page when hyperlinks clicked in (say) mail client

Running FF 2.0.0.20 under Win98SE. For some time, FF has been
exhibiting issues: "FF has performed an illegal instruction and will
now close" or similar. Removing FF (using Control panel - Add/Remove
Program) and reinstalling hasn't fixed this at all.

So between removing and reinstalling I ran a registry cleaner to
remove the residue of FF. Real bad idea, it seems - although
something "extra" was needed beyond just remove/reinstall.

Now if I click on a link in an email message, FF opens a new blank
page. So something got broken, but I have no idea what.

Posted a question to the FF support forum a couple of weeks back, but
no answers - they are probably still ROFL-ing at anyone still using
Win98SE.

Any suggestions what might be broken and how to reinstate it would be
welcome.

who where wrote:
Running FF 2.0.0.20 under Win98SE. For some time, FF has been
exhibiting issues: "FF has performed an illegal instruction and will
now close" or similar. Removing FF (using Control panel - Add/Remove
Program) and reinstalling hasn't fixed this at all.

So between removing and reinstalling I ran a registry cleaner to
remove the residue of FF. Real bad idea, it seems - although

Yup. Bad idea.

something "extra" was needed beyond just remove/reinstall.

Now if I click on a link in an email message, FF opens a new blank
page. So something got broken, but I have no idea what.

Posted a question to the FF support forum a couple of weeks back, but
no answers - they are probably still ROFL-ing at anyone still using
Win98SE.

Any suggestions what might be broken and how to reinstate it would be
welcome.

IF your "registry cleaner" was kind enough to save an Undo file, you could
consider using that to undue whatever was removed by it, and then
reinstalling Firefox, as one suggestion. (I'm assuming you don't have any
older clone or image backups of your system, unfortunately, which is the
real solution to such problems). Since this was more than a few days ago,
you probably won't have any regular registry system backups (which are
normally saved by the system) to fall back to either, unfortunately.

who where wrote in
:

Now if I click on a link in an email message, FF opens a new blank
page. So something got broken, but I have no idea what.


Try unsetting, then resetting, FireFox as default browser. If that fails to
fix it, look in Regedit to see if the string "URL Protocol" appears in a few
places, usually associated with a classid (long bracketed string of
hexadecimal digits with a few dashes in it). If you see nothing to match that
simple description before the search reports no further matches for "URL
Protocol" it means you might need some more detailed fix. Reinstalling may be
easier for you than finding it, if there is no direct way to undo the
registry cleaner's action.

Bill in Co wrote:

who where wrote:

Running FF 2.0.0.20 under Win98SE. For some time, FF has been
exhibiting issues: "FF has performed an illegal instruction
and will now close" or similar.

When was ww's post made? It must have been more than a month ago.

Why are you replying to such an old post?

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:57:41 -0400, 98 Guy put finger to
keyboard and composed:

Bill in Co wrote:

who where wrote:

Running FF 2.0.0.20 under Win98SE. For some time, FF has been
exhibiting issues: "FF has performed an illegal instruction
and will now close" or similar.

When was ww's post made? It must have been more than a month ago.

NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:13:40 -0500

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:57:41 -0400, 98 Guy wrote:

Bill in Co wrote:

who where wrote:

Running FF 2.0.0.20 under Win98SE. For some time, FF has been
exhibiting issues: "FF has performed an illegal instruction
and will now close" or similar.

When was ww's post made? It must have been more than a month ago.

I had previously posted about this in comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows on
Oct 7. In a 24 April post I made reference to a FF2 crashing problem
in another context.

Unless I'm suffering old-timers', that's all I'm aware of.

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 04:47:55 -0500, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

who where wrote in
:

Now if I click on a link in an email message, FF opens a new blank
page. So something got broken, but I have no idea what.


Try unsetting, then resetting, FireFox as default browser.

BTDT. No improvement.

If that fails to
fix it, look in Regedit to see if the string "URL Protocol" appears in a few
places, usually associated with a classid (long bracketed string of
hexadecimal digits with a few dashes in it). If you see nothing to match that
simple description before the search reports no further matches for "URL
Protocol" it means you might need some more detailed fix.

Found as follows:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\cclaunch

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\file

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\firefoxURL
{default} "Firefox URL"
editflags "0x0000002 (2)"
FriendlyTypeName "Firefox URL"
URL Protocol ""

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ftp
{default} "URL:File Transfer Protocol"
editflags "0x0000002 (2)"
ShellFolder "thing"
Source Filter "thing2"
URL Protocol ""

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\gopher
[Somewhat similar to FTP]

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http
[now we may be getting warm]

{default} "URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol"
editflags "0x0000002 (2)"
Source Filter
"{E436EBB6-524F-11CE-9F53-0020AF0BA770}"

URL Protocol ""

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https
{default} "URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with
Privacy"
editflags "0x0000002 (2)"
Source Filter
"{E436EBB6-524F-11CE-9F53-0020AF0BA770}"

URL Protocol ""

Sumilar null values under:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MMS
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MMST
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MMSU
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSBD
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\news
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\rlogin
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\telnet
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\tn3270
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\vnd.ms.radio
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\x-eudora-option

Then null values again found under HKLM\Software\CLASSES\:

cclaunch
file
FirefoxURL (but not under FirefoxHTML preceding it)
ftp
gopher
http
https
mailto
etc as per HKCR list above.

Then null values again found under HKLM\Software\Clients\

Mail\Eudora\Protocols\Mailto
Mail\ForteAgent\Protocols\Mailto
Mail\Hotmail\Protocols\Mailto
News\ForteAgent\Protocols\news
News\ForteAgent\Protocols\nntp

None associated with a ClassID

(sorry abou the formatting and shortcuts above)

Reinstalling may be
easier for you than finding it, if there is no direct way to undo the
registry cleaner's action.

Reinstalling - as in Windoze - is a real pain simply because of the
serious number of apps and tweaks that need to be set up afterwards,
and the implications to productivity here.

If I could be confident that the FF crashing would also go away as a
result, I would indeed get interested.

who where wrote in
:

Reinstalling may be
easier for you than finding it, if there is no direct way to undo the
registry cleaner's action.

Reinstalling - as in Windoze - is a real pain simply because of the
serious number of apps and tweaks that need to be set up afterwards,
and the implications to productivity here.

If I could be confident that the FF crashing would also go away as a
result, I would indeed get interested.



First base now is to image your system so you can try things knowing you can
get back to where you are now. The best of long-term strategies would include
that one anyway, so if you don't do this, start doing it. Trusting the OS to
do it won't help, it's something we need to make a habit of. It doesn't need
doing often once you have a good known image to fall back on.

I don't know a specific fix for the FF thing, I suspect it's a URL and OLE
sort of thing that I might isolate once I do more work on my network module
for a recuced W98 I'm calling X98).

One thing you can try, if you ever recently exported the entire registry to a
file, is do this again now, then boot to DOS and use REGEDIT /C OLD_FILE.REG
to create a registry based on the old exported copy. See if FF works right,
then use REGEDIT /C NEW_FILE.REG to put the current one back so you can
explore the differences between the files. LOng, tedious work, but
ultimately, this is the only way to isolate the undocumented mysteries to
repeat them, never mind understand them. Which is why reinstalling all, and
creating REG files for the system (actually backup DAT files will do for
that), and also for each program you trust and have set up as you want.
Reinstalls can be very fast if you do this, and you also end up with safe
resets for any program you want. Get into the habit of making these, it will
always repay in time and effort saved later.

The only way you will find a fix for this if you don't do it that way, is to
find the results from someone who did. You might even find a neat fix, then
find it fails because a vital contextual support is also missing! So it
really does come down to good imaging of all, and parts, of clean installs.
So never mind 'productivity' being upset. Do it... The only reason people
don't do this with cars they need for work, when they start falling apart, is
that car parts can't be duplicated as easily and cheaply as bytes.

There is one fairly convenient thing you can try, and that's to remove and
reinstall all your networking support, software and hardware, like the TCP/IP
protocol in control panel, Network. Also reinstalling the network interface
driver. It's possible that some missign entry in the registry will be in an
INF file for some networking component, so reinstalling each one, checking FF
between each effort, will make it work, AND tell you which bit broke.

Another gambit is to install Internet Explorer v5.5, (or v5.1), whichever
version is supplied with W98's install CD. You'll need to use FireFox to
reset itself as default afterwards, but as it inherited some support from
Microsoft's deliberate attempt to link the OS with IE, you might get that
support rebuilt by doing this.

Lostgallifreyan wrote:


Another gambit is to install Internet Explorer v5.5, (or
v5.1), whichever version is supplied with W98's install CD.
You'll need to use FireFox to reset itself as default
afterwards, but as it inherited some support from Microsoft's
deliberate attempt to link the OS with IE, you might get that
support rebuilt by doing this.

I think i'd try a variation of this using whatever version of
Internet Explorer (IE) is currently installed.

In the options of Firefox (Ff), uncheck ~"Check to see if Firefox
is the default web-browser when launched" and then close Ff.

Start : Control-Panel : Internet Options : (Tab) Programs :
Here at the bottom enable the corresponding checkbox for Internet
Explorer.

Reboot computer and then launch IE and it will overwrite some
registry-entries with its default values. Close IE.

! - Here click in whatever unnamed email-program was used and
test if clicking a link (a HTTP-URL) in a mail now correctly
opens that URL in IE. - !

If working, open the control-panel and uncheck the above checkbox
again. Reboot machine. Open Ff, enable the checkbox is its
options again and click the "Check Now". Close Ff. (Reboot).

Now, again test clicking on a link from within the email-program.


--
Nah-ah. I'm staying out of this. ... Now, here's my opinion.