When software just won’t let go

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa On the rare occasions that a background software component malfunctions, the associated app might resist user control — or eve
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For what it’s worth, I occasionally get that exact problem with Firefox.  I’ve never had it linger, but sometimes it just takes its sweet time closing.  Waiting another 10-15 seconds before restarting has always worked just fine for me (your mileage, of course, may vary).

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rc primak

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Firefox is not unique in continuing to run in the background even after all visible windows are closed. Under Windows 10, Edge and maybe IE by design never really close. They continue to run processes in the background, and even after being shut down forcibly, automatically restart. Edge by default also starts up with Windows. Chrome also never shuts down without being given special attention. But Chrome by default does not automatically start up with Windows. Neither does Firefox.

This is partly a trend carried over from phone apps. But in Firefox’s case it preceded the Apps craze. FF used to be very slow to open (as were LibreOffice and MS Office). The developers decided users would rather leave such slow-opening programs running in an “idle” state, rather than have to wait for them to open normally.  Some other large programs behave the same way.

Now the whole OS (Windows 10 and all phone OSes) just “closes” to a hybrid sleep state. The OS is not really shut down fully without special attention. This also can mean that the modern restart process also is not fully shutting down the device before rebooting.

I’m not saying these “fake shutdowns” cause frequent issues. But if you ever have an issue which might be caused by this type of behavior, one step in solving the issue might be to make sure everything is in fact fully shut down, and not idling in the background or sleeping in a low-power hybrid hibernation state.

-- rc primak

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doriel

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Instead of all that manual uninstalling, why not just use Revo Uninstaller?  It does all of that for you!  (Just remember not to “Restart” during the uninstall, even if asked.)  Remember to run the “Scan” so it can look into the Registry and on the hard disk.

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Even Revo or Geek don’t get at all the services and processes a modern web browser installs. It pays to take the closer look which the manual approach uses. After a restart, you might find new leftovers which Geek and Revo in their free editions don’t find the first time around.

All of this advice (including everything in the article) only applies if there’s a malfunctioning component, or else you want a complete removal.

Sometimes running Firefox in Firefox Safe Mode will reveal what’s hanging, without tearing anything apart. Saving or exporting the user’s Profile may also help in reconstructing the parts which were working instead of having to rebuild from scratch. Just don’t restore the whole Profile at once, as this will reintroduce the malfunctioning component(s) in many cases.

In Linux we have a Force Shutdown command which can effectively kill Firefox even if it doesn’t want to close on its own. I think Windows can do something similar.

-- rc primak

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Fred Langa’s article about how to uninstall and verify that the software is uninstalled, before reinstalling the software is really good. It basically is what I do whenever I want to make sure that all traces and settings for an uninstalled program have been removed. Under Fred’s Step 4, he needs to add searching for traces of the uninstalled program under Users. Any program settings under Users could potentially cause the same issues to reappear when reinstalling the program.

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GoneToPlaid wrote:

Fred Langa’s article about how to uninstall and verify that the software is uninstalled, before reinstalling the software is really good. It basically is what I do whenever I want to make sure that all traces and settings for an uninstalled program have been removed. Under Fred’s Step 4, he needs to add searching for traces of the uninstalled program under Users. Any program settings under Users could potentially cause the same issues to reappear when reinstalling the program.

If you use a software like the free portable Geekuninstaller, the app will uninstall and search for all remaining bits, including in registry.. and remove them.

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Re: Insurmountable Microsoft Word incompatibilities?

I agree with Fred’s advice on what to do first. But I have another suggestion: fonts.

Different versions of Word have come with different fonts, and of course, people install even more fonts into Windows on their PCs. When a document uses a font that’s not on your system, Word does its best to substitute a similar or compatible font, but that’s not always possible. In this font substitution process, I’ve seen spaces between words get lost, not just visibly, but the space character actually gobbled up.

Talk to the people giving you documents, and agree on a font you both have installed in your Windows systems, even if that’s not the font you intend for the final document. See if this clears up the problem.

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I had that problem with process “Windows problem reporting”. Literally eating all my HW sources. I set my diagnostic data to “Basic” and problem disappeared.
Windows is excellent in running background processes without users approval, it does it all the time. But by my opinion mostly to speedup apllication start and updates.

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