User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050712 Firefox/1.0+ Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050712 Firefox/1.0+ The plugins in Deer park completly disapeared after shutting down and closing out deerpark with only a few extensions installed. I've reinstalled deerpark still plugins are gone. Reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1.Installed a few compatible extensions. adblock, noscript, tabmix plus, dictionary search,rip. 2. open up about:config and change <code>browser.search.defaulturl</code> to <code>http://www.google.com/search?q=</code> 3. Now exited and restarted with sanitize and plugins gone missing. Actual Results: plugins are gone. Expected Results: The plugins should be there

My dad's had this happen to him as well -- no idea what caused it. He's unable to add new search plugins; it just always remains an empty menu with the "Add Engines" menu item.

localstore.rdf seems to be overwritten with nulls, and we don't recover from this -- the search plugin issue is caused by us failing when we try to read it. This is also causing rafael's issue of having his toolbars revert to the default. If localstore.rdf is corrupted, we never try to save it -- because we "save" it by just interacting with it through the RDF xml datasource, which won't try to save if it can't read. I have no idea how this file gets corrupted; it's full of nulls with both my dad's and Rafael's profile.

Is it appropriately sized as if it were a real localstore.rdf, but it's all-nulls? Was this seen on windows only?

(In reply to comment #3) > Is it appropriately sized as if it were a real localstore.rdf, but it's > all-nulls? Was this seen on windows only? Windows-only, and yeah; it was a few kb in size, all nulls.

localstore.rdf is a kitchensink, so I'm afraid it's not easy to specify what was caused that null problem unless we have reproducible steps. As for InternetSearch, I wonder whether it's worth moving info from localstore to search.rdf, which is another datasource in the profile. It's just a workaround, but it would reduce the heavy access to localstore.rdf and maybe prevent a potential corruption. At least, it should a little help investigating the null issue... dataloss?

We don't even have a handle on this yet so I don't think we're going to see this make 1.5. If QA can narrow this down in the next couple of days and there's a simple and low-risk fix, please nominate the patch.

I don't think we can narrow it down or come up with a fix, but we can come up with a bandaid that will prevent people from getting stuck in this broken state (and we understand what that state is -- a corrupted localstore.rdf). Once you get in this state, there is *no way* to recover your profile, without knowing that you either have to go into safe mode and "reset toolbars" or deleting localstore.rdf from the magic profile folder.

In Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, I had a possibly related problem: I tried to add Wikipedia using the normal Mozilla page for adding search engines; the "Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared UNDER the "Add Engines..." command, and then disappeared shortly thereafter. Attempting to add it again failed, but then when I quit Firefox and restarted it, the "Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared at the end of the normal list of search engines, and so far seems to be staying there. One other thing that might help with diagnosis: when the "Wikipedia&Google" entry temporarily disappeared, an extra border appeared in the search engine menu, under "Add engines..." I don't know enough of the innards of Firefox to know whether this is a related problem that DIDN'T corrupt localstore.rdf (I just checked -- can't say whether mine is fully valid, but at least it is not overwritten with nulls), or something else altogether.

(In reply to comment #8) > In Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, I had a possibly related problem: I tried to add > Wikipedia using the normal Mozilla page for adding search engines; the > "Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared UNDER the "Add Engines..." command, and then > disappeared shortly thereafter. Attempting to add it again failed, but then > when I quit Firefox and restarted it, the "Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared at > the end of the normal list of search engines, and so far seems to be staying > there. > > One other thing that might help with diagnosis: when the "Wikipedia&Google" > entry temporarily disappeared, an extra border appeared in the search engine > menu, under "Add engines..." I've seen this happen as well; usually it's caused by clicking the search menu too quickly after adding a new engine (there's a race condition somewhere). When it happens, the search plugins menu is usually screwed, and requires a new window to be created (or a restart). But it shouldn't corrupt the localstore.rdf.

I have this behavior in firefox, since 1.5RC2 too! I tried to see, what happens, if the search plugins were existing not only in my profile, but in the main searchplugin directory, but nothing changed!

Reported in Linux and Mac OS X also. See Bug 318306, Comment 4.

The new search service doesn't rely on localstore.rdf, and there's no evidence that these types of problems are occuring with the new search service (any cases of this behavior in the new search service would probably be separate bugs anyways).