Comment 177 for bug 255263

I had exactly the problem outlined in this bug thread. However, by a process of elimination, I located the offending file. In my case the offending file that caused Firefox's "spasm" (a term given by this bug thread starter) was "search.json" located in Firefox’s Profile directory.

Upon renaming the Profile directory to something, and then executing Firefox, Firefox is forced to create a new profile. The "spasm" was confirmed not to occur in the new profile.

Exiting Firefox and replacing the "search.json" with the offending "search.json" into the new profile directory, then firing-up Firefox, the dreaded Firefox "spasm" once again takes hold.

As stated earlier, it was by a process of elimination that found the offending file. In this process, I tested other files such as, content-prefs.sqlite, cookies.sqlite, downloads.sqlite, formhistory.sqlite, localstore.rdf, permissions.sqlite, search.sqlite, webappsstore.sqlite, in a similar manner, but none of them could replicate the "spasm".

I presume the file "search.json" gets corrupted and some how incapacitates the address bar.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0