Any reason why Firefox refuses to save anything now?
 

It started happening last night. Firefox doesn't save anything I want to save. Images, programs, you name it. Nothing happens when I try to save stuff. I'm DLing 2.0 right now to see if that fixes the problem. In the mean time, I'm using IE.

P.S. I am off to bed soon, so I will probably not reply until the next day.

Update: Nope, 2.0 still doesn't save anything. I suppose it just hates me.

Hmm. Is your download list completely empty? When it gets too too full (i.e a very long list of past download) everything slows down, and in extreme cases will make FireFox completely useless.

Hmm, the download list IS empty and it DID have lots of DLs in it before. How do I rectify this?

P.S. I'm going to bed right now, so I won't be here to see your answer.

This happened to me, too. I was also using IE in the meantime, because I couldn't figure out a way to fix the problem, and then a file in my MBR got deleted somehow, and now I'm using Linux instead of Windows. I can't remember if I tried to reinstall Firefox, but you might backup your bookmarks and everything and try that, although if you installed 2.0 and it didn't work, I doubt reinstalling will help you.

So I can't use Firefox anymore just 'cause I don't clear up the Downloads box? It just feels too silly for me. Guess I'm stuck using IE then.

You can always try backing up bookmarks and nuking your profile. I can't see why a profile wipe won't help this. They're in C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox, if I recall? Been far too long since I've used Windows.

You'd have to set all your options and such up again, but if it gets the browser back...

This happened to me a while back and I got pretty frustrated with it until I found the solution on the Mozillazine forums. In my case, it had to do with a corrupt downloads.rdf file (which is located in the directory Duminas mentioned). Delete downloads.rdf while Firefox isn't running and it will be recreated the next time you start Firefox.

OMG it worked!! Thanks a lot, coeccias and everyone else who replied in this thread!

GFF has solved all of my hardware/software problems every single time. I love this board!!

When do you mean by can't save anything? Just curious.

Say you wanted to download a zip file from somewhere. You click the link to it, and it simply doesn't download. You right-click> Save As.., it isn't downloaded. You just can't download anything.

Haha, i knew it was that bloody download list file. I was using an old version of Firefox years ago and had to resort to IE for downloads until I finally found out what was causing the problem. It's pretty stupid, because Firefox still slows down even after a few entries in the list. If you don't set the download window to open each time, you'd never even know the list was growing.

A good prevention for this, by the way, is to have Firefox automatically clear the downloads list either when Firefox exits or whenever a download finishes.

For Firefox 2 this is done in Options -> Privacy -> Uncheck "Remember what I've downloaded"

And in previous versions, it's under privacy, but it would ask when you would like it done.

Extensions like Download Statusbar also have options to have the download history be automatically cleared.