I have K-meleon 7.51 installed formonths now and using it happily.
Until yesterday, it just stopped running. clicking the shortcut or the exe shows some activity then nothing happened.
In Task Manager, K-Meleon appears in the task list and then dissapears.
I have profile backups I made every day, but restoring previous backups did not help even when I restored a month old known good profile.
I also have monthly full backups, so I replaced all binaries in the installed folder with the known good ones that were OK when backed up, no success.
Then I thought what I did? the only thing I did before this happened is to download slim browser portable just because to see its multi-threaded download manager as they claim. So I delete slimbrowser, remove all reminants of it from the registry, then to be more carefull, I restored the full windows xp registry by ERUNT ( I made registry backups every now and then), BUT no success.
Whay is ahppened?
I have eset nod32 antivirus with latest definition, I scanned the whole system, its cleaned. Also no other issue besides the K-Meleon.

My system:
Windows XP Professional SP3 (updated all fixes)
4 GB RAM
K-Meleon 75.1
Note: I have many custom macros and add-ons installed that I hate do re-install KM again, because for some I spent days to get work.
Please help

EDIT: one more thing, I also have KM 1.6 installed in another folder named KM6, and it is working.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2016 08:40AM by WasiAzeem.

Most likely. Update of virus software, changed setting or new virus software.

Make sure that the protections software is in learning mode and make sure that K-Meleon has the right to go to the internet. Put protection program into learning mode and allow K-Meleon.exe.

Also make sure that K-Meleon.exe is in a folder that has rights to start an exe.

Less likely. Change/edit in skin can in some cases stop K-Meleon starting.
If a error happened during the edit.

Maybe try with stable 76 beta3.

p.s. Do not know You protection software.

According to what You posted You have excluded other reasons I know.

Maybe try with param: k-meleon.exe -new (can start K-Meleon.exe when another K-Meleon is running / provided that it owns its independent profile)



Greetings from Germany



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2016 11:53AM by guenter.

Your backups are fantastic, congratulations!! (wish mine were half as good, or even 10%, sigh)

Hope that anyone or yourself can figure out this mystery, or that guenters tips help already.
Suspect some system stuff/settings, no clue about that myself.

But with those complete backups not much worries about a KM reinstall, since everything can be copied back again.
Just no idea if reinstalling KM would help in this case. Just for testing, perhaps try copying the whole KM program folder to another place and start from there. Or add a new file in it named "profile.ini" to make it portable, that means to autocreate new profiles inside the program folder at next start (contents can later be copied over between profile folders, macros too). Or download again the whole portable version and unzip it elsewhere.

Rebooting the computer 2x often helps too for mysterious stuff, but you probably did that already.

Have just done some googling now for your prob and hits are rare, with this one perhaps the most promising:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-wont-start-find-solutions

Or perhaps the crashreport plugin may reveal anything:
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?3,60195

About registry backups, am doing that myself, but have lately suspected it only helps to reset OVERWRITTEN old settings, but not DELETE completely new, additional settings Considering it's a function that also _imports_ little reg snippets, that must mean NOT deleting all other stuff in the reg?
IIRC the registry is not a single system file at all, but composed at each system start from 4 several system files, like autoexec, win.ini etc.
Just now rediscovered again a great native windows tool, start>run>msconfig, includes a great startup config tool and a probably much better reg backup as just the "registry" alone. Could kick myself, so much forgotten again over the years sigh.
And of course there are general free tools like Aida32 or Sandra to check all sorts of system settings, incl. autostart and drivers.

Yet another thought: perhaps deleting slim browser has deleted some necessary shared system files? In that case dependency walker may reveal which ones: www.dependencywalker.com



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2016 12:51PM by siria.

Quote

www.dependencywalker.com

Definitively, is what I first thought. Give it a try, loggin full paths and, even for me still is hard to understand, you could send the resulting .bwi log to one of us privately (I wouldn't make it public here).





@Siria, I forgot how registry worked on Windows 98, but on NT systems (NT 4.0 to latest 10) the registry is a few file hives and restoring it (one of them or all) with utilities like ERUNT, replaces the hives by the old, meaning that the registry is as it was before, so doesn't leave traces of old keys or deletes other keys.

Quote
JohnHell
... on NT systems (NT 4.0 to latest 10) the registry is a few file hives and restoring it (one of them or all) with utilities like ERUNT, replaces the hives by the old, meaning that the registry is as it was before, so doesn't leave traces of old keys or deletes other keys.

Does Windows System Restore do the same thing with the registry? I've used that in the past to cure a multitude of problems, sometimes caused by my own stupid mistakes. These days I create new restore points quite frequently, because I wouldn't want to restore settings which are so old that I'd lose a lot of my deliberate changes. Also, the automatic restore points created by Windows can sometimes back up undesirable settings and/or system files before I have the chance to discover a problem, so I use my initials to identify my manual restore points and delete the automatic ones.

---
Gerry

WasiAzeem,

are you visiting non-latin domains? For example, cyrillic ones (I mean those that have non-latin URL).

If so, KM 75.1 has real problem with them. They crash the browser.

Try to open your profile folder, find there file sessions.json, backup it somewhere and delete from profile. Restart KM.

What happens now?

Quote
foliator

Quote
JohnHell
... on NT systems (NT 4.0 to latest 10) the registry is a few file hives and restoring it (one of them or all) with utilities like ERUNT, replaces the hives by the old, meaning that the registry is as it was before, so doesn't leave traces of old keys or deletes other keys.

Does Windows System Restore do the same thing with the registry? I've used that in the past to cure a multitude of problems, sometimes caused by my own stupid mistakes. These days I create new restore points quite frequently, because I wouldn't want to restore settings which are so old that I'd lose a lot of my deliberate changes. Also, the automatic restore points created by Windows can sometimes back up undesirable settings and/or system files before I have the chance to discover a problem, so I use my initials to identify my manual restore points and delete the automatic ones.

I guess, but you are asking the wrong person. First thing after install XP or above: disable system restore.


Thanks, but I prefer to be responsible of my disasters and make backups by myself.

Or in other words, do what WasiAzeem does.

Quote
JohnHell
First thing after install XP or above: disable system restore.

Oh great - and there I was planning to use it when someday using another system. Which are the probs with it?

Thanks guys too many replies. Believe me, these replies from all of you makes me happy enough to compensate the tragedy of KM.
Coming to the topic, I had to read all posts here, and I did tried on some suggestion.
@guenter: I did scan my system with ESET NOD32 System Security / Antivirus, with the latest definitions. Also Kerio Personal firewall that I've been using fore more than a decade (win 98 & XP SP3 systems)
Ran Spybot full scan, nothing found.
My suspicions were either some DLL's have been deleted or overwritten by some software (I blame SlimBrowse porable, I really hate that now). Curious to find the cause, I didn't restore full system from Ghost backup, rather I extracted WINDOWS, Program Files and Documents and Settings, to another drive's partition (not restored, extracted via Ghost Explorer), and did a binary comparison by ICEMIRROR, but I didn't find any changed or deleted DLL or so.
Then I archived and deleted whole profile folder, no success.
then I copied profile folder from KM 1.6 and edited the profile.ini, no success, same thing.
k-meleon.exe -new gave the same result.
@siria, it is windows xp sp3, I do have win98 se on another partition, no system.ini, win.ini, autoexec.bat config.bat system.dat user.dat here, as said by JohnHell. During this time I have cold booted so many times. ALL other things are OK, no crash etc so no memory faults things.
@JohnHell I did not try dependencywalker but please read ahead. ( I am afraid you will make my .bwi log public
@foliator, alas I disabled System Restore long time ago but I do make backups with ghost, I have a bad habbit of doing same stupid things you mentioned, I think I did something and now not remembering.
@rodocop, yes you are right, I visited non-latin domains, chinese
One thing I missed to mentioned. I booted on Windows 98 SE and did a scandisk (it is FAT32 system for obvious reason) bec I thought may be some files are cross-linked.
About sessions.json, I actually deleted the whole profile but same thing, however a new profile has created in the profile folder but I cant start KM.
@siria,I am in middle of downloading KM 75.1 again an will install on another folder as you suggested.
yes I did that stupid thing, installed Slimbrowser that actually did slimdown KM.
I'll be here again after some minutes i think with results of what you all have proposed.

Edit: I compared the files with the newly downloaded KM 75.1, omni.ja is different in size. ON my installed KM, its 1409 Kb and in K-meleon75.17z it is 2714 Kb in size. Is it suspicious? I didn't remember I did this or what, any how I extracted omni.ja and replaced, my bad the same result, KM doesnt start.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2016 11:46PM by WasiAzeem.

Quote
siria

Quote
JohnHell
First thing after install XP or above: disable system restore.

Oh great - and there I was planning to use it when someday using another system. Which are the probs with it?

From above:

Thanks, but I prefer to be responsible of my disasters and make backups by myself.


For the average, there is no problem, for me, starts on disk space usage. And why?, read the line above.

This was a personal opinion to answer foliator.

Quote
WasiAzeem
@JohnHell I did not try dependencywalker but please read ahead. ( I am afraid you will make my .bwi log public

It was a suggestion. Have in mind anyway, that I don't fully understand Dependency Walker log files, but maybe one of us (guenter, siria, rodocop, Dorian, or other advanced users, as I wasn't saying only me) could help.


Anyway, initially suggested by Siria, then by me, Dependency Walker would be the best approach to find a reason.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2016 11:56PM by JohnHell.

I extracted newly downloaded "K-meleon75.1.7z " to another location, and KM started with barebone settings, i mean no addons, no customization no extension.

1. please tell me about the file size difference of omni.ja as I mentioned above.
2. I am gonna dig as deep as I can to find out the cause of this malfunction, so I will not re-install extensions or so, rather will add all those stuff one by one from my malfunctioned KM installation, hope I'll find something.

@siria and JohnHell, sure I will try dependencywalker too.

When right-clicking on kmeleon.exe, Dependency Walker will simply show a table and highlight in red which system files etc. may be missing, if any. Didn't know it also creates logs (But John certainly is trustworthy when he says he wouldn't publish private stuff)

About omni.ja, can remember there exists a modified version by rodocop, automatically overwriting the original one when installing his improved ABP-addon. It wouldn't have worked otherwise. Just surprised about the size difference, no idea if it's this one.

Good that the new KM copy works now!
Am wondering if maybe just your old KM path is somewhere blacklisted or whatever?? Would create yet another new profile with it, then simply copy over the old contents as test. Then the same for the user macros.

yes, 'small' omni.ja is from KM Pro and ABP package.

But this shouldn't be the reason of non-working browser.

At any rate nothing to worry about how it got there, no malware.

And you may be right on the spot with the non-latin domains too. Who knows, that URL may still be lingering around somewhere, perhaps in a reg MRU, or in a last-tabs-macro or whatever.

Hmm, and the last time someone had "mysterious" profile probs, he just kept looking in the wrong profile folder, not realizing for months his KM version was portable, by containing the empty "profile.ini" in the root folder! In combination with a "clever", secret win7 automatic redirect that was deadly. Then again, wouldn't happen on XP, and considering all your backups, you'd long since have noticed if the files in the folder would never change ;-)

Quote
JohnHell

Quote
siria

Quote
JohnHell
First thing after install XP or above: disable system restore.

Oh great - and there I was planning to use it when someday using another system. Which are the probs with it?

From above:

Thanks, but I prefer to be responsible of my disasters and make backups by myself.

For the average, there is no problem, for me, starts on disk space usage. And why?, read the line above.

This was a personal opinion to answer foliator.

True, disk space usage can be a problem, but only if older restore points, particularly the automatic ones made periodically by Windows, are left on the system. They can all be removed and a new manual one created immediately after that.

Also, there's an option to limit the number of restore points written to disk by specifying a percentage of the total disk space. In my case, after using the feature I wind up with just my single manual restore point, amounting to only 1%, or 75 MB of my internal hard drive's 250 GB. This has always gotten me out of hot water.

Note here that I'm referring to Windows 7's System Restore feature. On Windows XP, which I used prior to 2011, there may have been some differences in the restore point options, but I can't remember.

---
Gerry

I see 2 subjects here:
1. Failure of the browser to open/run;
2. The supposed 'feature' of an OS to repair itself.

On 1.:
I've had & fixed a similar problem using FF.
Despite the fact that I use ONLY portable versions of browsers, it had dumped a bunch of junk into the C: drive even though it runs out of the F: drive.
There were a bunch of files in various 'mozilla' folders - which I cleaned out & then used DOS era methods to prevent recurrences.
FF might flicker, but did not open.
Very carefully then, I restored the locations until I found the single one that it was trying to write to - then it worked again.

On 2.:
The nonsensical 'system restore', in my experiences, was just another way to get folks believing the fallacy of the self-repairing windows...in reality it contributed largely to winrot.

Learning how to avoid the problem(s) of winrot is a huge subject & beyond the scope of a mere forum reply - but this I will say here:
The ONLY OS that gang ever released that approached being self-maintaining in any manner was Win2kPro - and they nuked both it & its reputation as quickly as possible simply because it was TOO GOOD. (Hence unprofitable.)

Perhaps one day K-Meleon will arrive in a (truly) Linux version, and then most worries will be left behind...!