Ex-Expat's dashboard

Caveat,

Tell yourself whatever you want about your behaviour. I didn't expect you to be able to learn from what I said. You have unfortunately proven my suspicion that explaining your boorishness would amount to nothing as you are beyond help in this regard.

>> the keyboard stopped working. So I restarted the computer

If you had taken my advice to run chkdisk, and followed the instructions to do a thorough scan, that process in itself would have necessitated a reboot. Your own statement above proves that you did not implement the suggested solution and continued to complain instead. Thus you are beyond help in a technical capacity as well.

Thank you Alfie. I'm so glad you found a solution. No worries, I know better than to let one person sour me from helping all the other great people out there, like yourself. Cheers and merry Christmas to you!

Caveat,

We appear to have bit of a communication problem.

First, please remember that I am not being paid for this, nor am I with any organization. I am simply an individual trying to help in my spare time, as a gesture of good will. While I certainly understand your frustration with your situation, your angry demanding tone and sarcastic comments do nothing to encourage anyone here to help you in your plight. And when people take a lot of time and energy researching your problem, a simple 'thank you' goes a long way... even if they may not have found the solution to your problem just yet. At least they're trying to help.

Second, it would also help to remember that your problem is not the only one described here. I have answered in such a way as to cover a number of scenarios with basic instructions, not because I am ignoring your description of the problem, but because it may also help others in the same boat who have less knowledge than yourself.

Lastly, not everything you are asked to try is necessarily an immediate solution. I asked you to try uninstalling/reinstalling Firefox and creating a new profile to help ensure that, for example, your Firefox setup file didn't get corrupted. This was for my assurance, not yours. The person troubleshooting needs to use his or her own knowledge and understanding to troubleshoot the problem. No offence meant, but if yours had been sufficient to resolve the problem you would not be seeking assistance now. When efforts such as this to test the nature of the problem, are immediately shot down as failed solutions and proof that the troubleshooter is not listening (thus necessitating bold type and sarcasm), it simply discourages people from helping.

Mind you, most people would not have bothered to take the time explaining all of this to you; they'd simply have stopped answering you or never even started. While you may not think so, it is a testament to my willingness to help that, despite the fact that this should all be common sense, I'm still taking the time to explain how you are sabotaging your own chances of finding a solution.

All that said, I will continue to attempt to find solutions that work for your issue and that of others here. However, I am not convinced I can help you specifically, Caveat, under such conditions. No one enjoys spending their free time getting hit over the head for their efforts at a thankless task.

I found some discussion along the lines of what you describe. It's a lot of reading, so I'll summarize below. NOTE: Before you start any of these solutions, close all programs especially Firefox. Modifying Firefox files while Firefox is still open can cause problems (that's true of any program), and disk scans can't access your files to fix them if they're in use.
http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_...

Several Windows users have been able to fix this issue by running chkdisk, a Windows utility that checks for corrupted areas on your hard drive. Here are detailed instructions from Microsoft's website:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=31...

Some Linux users have fixed it by updating the sqlite package. Usually this is done from the package manager, such as Synaptic or YUM. Click refresh to get the newest list of packages, search for sqlite3 and mark it for installation. It should automatically uninstall the old sqlite 2.x version. Apply the changes.

Just out of curiosity, what extensions or add-ons do you have installed? Maybe you all have the same bookmarks add-on that manipulates the places.sqlite file or changes the way Firefox writes to this file. You can try temporarily disabling all your add-ons and see if that helps. It's called running Firefox in Safe Mode and there are detailed instructions for doing that in Windows, Linux, and MacOS here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode

Caveat, sounds like your problem is different from mine. Sorry my idea didn't work.

Another idea, to help determine how much of the problem is Firefox corruption and how much is corruption of your actual bookmarks database:

1) Re-download the Firefox setup file (in case your original setup file got corrupt)
2) Uninstall Firefox
3) Run the Firefox setup file you just downloaded and let it create a new profile
4) Does the new profile seem to be working okay, including bookmarks? It should, unless something more serious, such as a virus or spyware, is going on with your system.
5) If the new profile works: close Firefox - then go to the new profile's folder, rename places.sqlite to places.sqlite_old and bookmarks.html to bookmarks.html_old, then manually copy places.sqlite and bookmarks.html from the old profile.
6) Launch Firefox again. Does it still work? If not, then it's your bookmark database that is corrupted and not Firefox. Which brings me to the next point:

Especially if you're running Windows, mysterious corruption problems can be caused by viruses, spyware and the like. I recommend installing all 3 of these. They all have free versions that work great and I've been using them on customer systems for years (I'm a computer tech):

Spybot Search & Destroy (antispyware)
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/do...

Ad-Aware (antispyware)
http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-2008...

AVG (antivirus)
http://free.avg.com/

Run scans with these, as many times as you have to until no more infections are found. Hope that helps!

What I meant is, after you give a name to the no-name tag, the rogue bookmark(s) stop the bizarre behaviour and you can delete them if you wish. Did you try my suggestion? Was there a no-name tag as I described? Your reply didn't say.

Specifically:

Go to Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks
Go to the left column and click the arrow next to Tags to expand it
Find the tag with no name, it's in brackets [ ] and says something like [not specified] or [unnamed]
Click that tag and go to the right column to the Name field and type anything, i.e. Test
Go back to the left column and click the word Tags
The [unnamed] tag should now be called Test
All bookmarks under the Test tag, now shown in the right column, should now be deletable or you can modify them as you wish.

I had this problem too, with one bookmark under a mysterious no-name tag. The bookmark would not delete. Adding or changing the tags on the bookmark only created more unremovable tags since I couldn't delete the tags once they were added on. The tags list for this bookmark had a comma at the beginning that wouldn't delete even if I tried to delete all the tags:

, exampletag1, exampletag2

I was able to normalize its function by going to the no-name tag and renaming it, or more accurately, giving it a name since it didn't have one. Then the no-name tag showed up as a normal deletable tag and peace was restored. :)

Hope that helps!