The Lonesome Road

Note : Will not make sense till you read the post below. Seriously.

A = me and N is Anshul. Enjoy

A: see post
A: the end
N: ouch
N: *o-u-c-h*
A: yeah!
A: the funny thing is
A: it’s off across the board
A: IE, Opera and FF
N: your comp has been flashed clean
A: truly
N: check if registry key is back
A: nope
N: search registry for macromedia
A: found a factory object
N: hmmm is that good or bad
A: no idea
N: i’ve forgotten
A: there is flashfactory.flashfactory
A: flashprop.flashpro
A: p
N: i vaguely remember either it was a bad thing - residual stuff - or a normal thing - installed with the installer
N: hmmmm
N: the registry is screwed man what is all this trash
A: annoying man
N: very much so
N: google?
A: looks like it
N: so any luck
A: nope
A: all flash obj deleted
A: but no go
N: hmmm
N: reinstall flashplayer
N: ?
A: tried
A: zippo
N: hmmmm
A: do not seek to reinstall the flash. Instead understand - there is no flash
N: no flash working now? as in even on my page?
N: lol
N: true enough
A: your @#$@#$@# badge works!
N: hahaha
N: ouch
A: dude
A: I can live with it
A: if I can figure out WHY
N: haha
N: yeah
N: i know
N: the thing that killed the feline animal
N: is dangerous
A: I know…
A: but what to do
A: it entices and lures me into the dark depths of the registry
N: where there be dragons
A: of course

Later all!

Due to a set of circumstances I do not want to talk about (believe me - I don’t), Firefox needed to be re-installed on my computer.

From experiece, the only thing I know that’s worth saving is the bookmarks I have collected (and sorted) over time. So the bookmarks were duly exported and I was pleased.

Then a quick reinstall took place and Firefox was back on it’s throne as my ruling browser. Unfortunately, it seems that during the reinstall, the original FF was replaced by it’s idiotic twin brother.

Ok here’s the thing. When I started the new FF, it looked and felt like the old thing - but there were subtle differences. My extensions and plug-ins were all working fine. Just had to re-tweak the about:config page again to get the speed settings correct. I was happy.

Then it came crashing down.

I opened Gmail - typed in my credentials, pressed enter. It said loading…and then gave me a blank screen and a done message in the status bar. Now, I have written about this problem earlier (don’t know which month the post was from) and the work around is to go to the address bar and change “http://” to “https://”. This was something I was not expecting.

It got worse from there.

I opened my blog after publishing a post and noticed something was amiss - my Flick badge consisted of the border - and nothing else. The funny part was when I opened Anshul’s site, his Flickr badge could be seen in all it’s glory. Now I was getting annoyed.

Wait - there’s more.

Finally, I opened Google video, opened a video - and all I saw was a blank screen with the images of the video on the right hand side.

After turning the air around me blue, I decided to get rid of FF from the ground up and reinstall it. If you want to do it clean - here’s how :

1) Uninstall from Add/Remove Programs

2) Go to Documents and Settings -> User name -> Application Data and delete the Mozilla folder (unless you have Thunderbird as well. In which case delete the Firefox directory)

3) Delete Program Files -> Mozilla Firefox directory.

Once that was done, I uninstalled the Flash player as well. The problems above (other than the gmail thing) are flash related.

After doing all this, I installed Firefox. It was as good as a clean install. All my extensions and bookmarks were gone. Once they were back, I opened Google video again.

And saw a blank screen - with no bar that said Mussing plug-in. Click here to install missing plugins.

Frustrated, I opened the registry. Went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Mozilla plugins and deleted the registry key for the Macromedia plugin I found there.

Presto! Google video and flash work again!

I don’t get it - when I say uninstall - I want every bit (every 0 and 1) of the program OUT of my system. Don’t want ghosts on my drive that come back to haunt me…

Until next time - go get a mac!

Update : It seems that Flash has gone off again. Once again there is a blank screen on google video and a border on my Flick badge.

Somebody help me!!