XP Pro has a nasty habbit of maintaining numerous instances of Firefox.exe (Firefox) running in the Task Manager. This means that although you ‘think’ Firefox is closed; it isn’t. It’s still residing in memory and taking cycles - but isn’t able to be displayed because you’ve allegedly ‘closed it’. IMHO, this is a flaw with XP Pro (I haven’t seen it in XP Home - not saying it doesn’t exist there; I’m just unaware of it).
So, either of these solutions should work.
1) Restart your machine when this beasties pops up - frustrating, consumes time and patience, but it should work.
2) Right click on task bar, pull up Task Manager. Switch to ‘Processes’ Tab, select and cancel each and every ‘Firefox.exe’ process you have running.
Either one should get you up and running.
—This means that although you ‘think’ Firefox is closed; it isn’t. It’s still residing in memory and taking cycles - but isn’t able to be displayed because you’ve allegedly ‘closed it’.—
So, I’m not the only one. I’m just posting to vote for your response. It is what causes the problem for me on the rare occasion I have it. And it isn’t just Firefox. Winamp and some other software does it as well. I just get in the habbit, when an application won’t run, of checking to see if windows thinks it’s already running. I delete the one that shows up on the list and life is good again.
This one I know. I often have to use Task Manager to close FF completely.