Windows 10 Firefox Version Won’t Open

We have seen this issue pop up a lot this week. Firefox is showing up as several installed programs in “Programs and Features“. We used an .MSI package from FrontMotion so the original file could be distributed via Active Directory.

You would think a simple solution would be to re-install or go back a version, but it isn’t. We haven’t found an great fix but a good work around.

Research lead us to installing version 59. This version had shown no issues with Windows 10. After installing this on a dozen machines users didn’t see any more issues. Here is a link for older versions of Firefox.

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

We learned it is better to use the “Custom” install over the “Standard” install simply because this allowed us to uncheck the “Maintenance service“. After we got version 59 installed we opened Firefox and it crashes with the following message.

The program would crash and this dialog box would go away. We had to try to open Firefox a couple more times until we got the dialog box to “Refresh” Firefox. Once this was done Firefox was running normally.

We set up Firefox to not install updates. Click on the “hamburger” menu in the upper right. Select “Options” and go to the General tab. UncheckUse a background service to install updates“.

We also discovered using “about:config ” in a new tab. This gave us a page warning us about the risk. We clicked okay on the warning and then we could just by clicking on the service turn it on and off.

Let us know if this helped you…

Snipping Tool Not Working

We got a call where someone’s all important Snipping Tool wasn’t working. When I connected to them to take a look it was easy to see what they saw. When you clicked on the shortcut this was all you would get.

This was an easy fix by making a new shortcut to the executable. It was C:\Windows\system32\snippingtool.exe.

Let us know if this helped you…

Using Redirects In Joomla

When launching our new website we tried to keep the URLs of the web pages the same as they were in the past. This didn’t quite work out like planned. The old site was using an underscore for dividing words in the URL, and the new one was using dashes. This caused indexed pages to produce a 404 page not found error. We decided to use redirects until the new pages got indexed.

The process is pretty straight forward.

  • Go to Components >> Redirects
  • Click on “New”
  • Enter the “Expired URL”. Our example “managed_it_services.html”
  • Enter the “New URL”. Our example “services/it-support-services.html”
  • Save

We went back to Google Analytics. In the Search Console >> Landing Pages section. We clicked on the icon to launch the page.

This however took us to our 404 page we have set up in the site. It seemed like the redirect didn’t work. When we got back to the Redirects section in Joomla was saw the “Redirects” plugin wasn’t enabled.

Once we enabled this the redirects happened right-a-way. The best part of enabling the URL Redirects plugin is it allowed us to record the URLs that someone went to. We could then create a redirect for that URL that we may not have listed otherwise.

Let us know if this helped you.

Outlook 2013 Can’t Create Signature

We got a call from a user that just got their laptop upgraded to Windows 10 using Office 2013. When the user tried to create their signature Outlook would freeze. Found a couple of links with suggestions, but this one did the trick.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/outlook-freezes-clicking-the-signature-button-c70b36c2-66ca-401c-ab45-f29a46495d02

The trick was to Settings >> Search for Apps. Click on “Apps and Features”, and uninstall “Microsoft Office Desktop Apps” and uninstall it. It did require a reboot, but everything was working after that.

Let us know if this helped you…

Delete VIPRE patchmanagement contents

Had a customer whos machine was running slow. We ran WinDirStat to see what was eating up the space on the machine. The pagesys file was huge, but a large chunk was under VIPRE. Specifically with the PatchManagement Patches.

According to VIPRE is it okay to delete out the contents of this folder. We found this information here.

https://support.threattracksecurity.com/support/discussions/topics/1000090855

Deleting the files went fine. We left the small .pup files since they were small.

Let us know if this helped you.

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