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Multiple Profiles in my roaming folder with same date/time stamps.. I only have one user on the system

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I am a little confused about my firefox profile.. I have only one profile set up.. it is in my local folder as it should be.. But... in my roaming folder there are 5 folders in my profile folder.. they are all showing the same date modified. There are may similar files in those folders.. is this normal?

I am a little confused about my firefox profile.. I have only one profile set up.. it is in my local folder as it should be.. But... in my roaming folder there are 5 folders in my profile folder.. they are all showing the same date modified. There are may similar files in those folders.. is this normal?
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Far from normal overall.

The 3 Profile folders with the -143..... at the end would indicate a Refreshed "default" Profile (normal that "default" appears for Refreshed Profiles only the "default" can be refreshed, but the numbers would never match each other, that's an Epoch time stamp for the date/time of the Refresh), but the other 2 make no sense with them both being "default" - the Profile Manager doesn't allow 2 with "default"; along with the date/time "stamp" being identical for all 5 Profiles.

Are the files sizes the same for each of the files inside of each Profile folder? And are the time stamps the same as the folders? Or the same for the same named files in each of the Profile folders?

I have never seen or even heard of a problem such as that.

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Time stamps for the internal folders and files for the most part seem to be the same... there are newer folders in one of the profiles..I am going to move one of the "defaults" to a temp folder on the system and see what happens

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It just occurred to me that I used the Refresh feature for the first time ever earlier this week and I have something strange going on with the profiles.ini file which is what basically 'controls' the Profiles.

Can you open the profiles.ini file in a text program like Wordpad - one folder up from the Profiles folder - and take a screenshot of the contents of that file. Then post that image here using the Browse ... button below the Post A Reply box.

Might give me an idea what may have gone amiss with your installation.

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[General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=default-1433535771207 IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/iamo5xjt.default-1433535771207 Default=1

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One thing that I neglected to ask - did you purposely Refresh Firefox, like to fix a problem or upon recommendation of Firefox via a message in Firefox?


[Profile0] Name=default-1433535771207 That is the Profile which Firefox is using now. Firefox doesn't even "know" those other 4 exist, seeing that they aren't in the profiles.ini file.

"Somehow" Firefox got Refreshed to give you that Profile with the iamo5xjt.default-1433535771207; that numeric string gets added when a Profile is Refreshed. No way of knowing how you ended up with two different ".default" Profiles to begin with or if that was a "fluke" inside of Firefox, and one of those should appear in the profiles.ini file - (the one that wasn't Refreshed" along with the one that is there. And only the one that was labeled Default=1 can be the "true" Default, regardless of the "name". I hope this all makes sense to you.

Between this issue and what happened earlier this week to me when I did a Refresh and losing one real Profile (from the profiles.ini file), I think there's a new regressive Bug in Firefox 43 or maybe earlier with either the Refresh feature or the Profile Manager with the Refresh feature. And I think that I am going to be contrary to my nature and not try to dig up a reason or the "fault"; and leave it be as one more step down the path towards my moving beyond Firefox after 13 1/2 years of using it. Too many changes too fast, and Mozilla is breaking too much and taking too long to "fix what they broke" if they ever fix it at all.

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I honestly do not remember ever doing a refresh.. I deleted the "extra" files and firefox appears to work fine...

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1433535771207 = June 5, 2015 So that profile got created at that date.

The folders in AppData\Roaming are the main profile folder. The folders in AppData\Local are use for the disk cache, see about:cache. If there is only one such folder in AppData\Local then that would be the profile that is currently being used. You can remove the other folders in AppData\Roaming that are no longer used and also do not show in profiles.ini.