Greforb,
I'm not sure what your definition of "crash" is. Me, I'm really a Unix/Linux guy and if a process fails to respond, that's a crash. Technically, the browser is still there and working, but it does not connect to the web (email, ssh, telnet everything else is hunky-dory)
So, on that basis, here is some more news. Following on from my previous post ("if Microsoft had decided to allow me the option of killing "iexplore" or "firefox" through the Task Manager (just like you could in XP or 2000), then none of this would be a problem"). I decided to test my accusation. I know I could not stop the process in Windows alone, so I solicited some help with:
1. KillProcess.exe
2. Daphne.exe
I've wanted to do this before, but everytime I need them, it is immediately after a browser "stop/crash/failure".... and then I can't download. (Doh!!!)
So, after the last reboot (Tuesday) I installed (if you can say that about KillProcess) both.
Today it crashed again. I tried to kill firefox.exe in TaskManager. Forget it. I ran KillProcess.exe. It appeared to remove the process, but still neither browser would work.
Daphne was much more forthcoming. A zombie process was running on the old firefox.exe process number. But even Daphne couldn't remove that. However, it showed the process was in a direct tree from "explorer.exe". And, as you would expect from Vista, if you kill explorer.exe the system wants to get out - you have to reboot or log off. Logging off doesn't help. The zombie process is still there.
In conclusion, some may say I have to eat my words because I have killed the process and it is still a problem. I'm not sure I really buy that, after all, the process is still running as a zombie, and I really do not care too much whether there is bad coding by a third party here, I really think Microsoft should have allowed me the option of clearing out bad processes....zombie and all! (But maybe I'm just used to good operating systems
).