• Saturday October 20th 2018
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geckotip

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What to do if you have problems installing GeckoTIP

Note: In everything below you can replace the word "Firefox" with "Thunderbird" and the suggestions still apply.

Note: In the procedures listed below, whenever you close Firefox it is important to make sure it doesn't still remain in memory in the background. Firefox 1.0.x in particular seems to remain in memory after being closed sometimes. To force it to completely shut down, after closing the window, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. This opens the task manager. If you find Firefox listed under "Programs", click the listing and hit delete to force it closed.

First steps:

• GeckoTIP requires a build of Firefox with Accessibility enabled. All official releases from Mozilla have Accessibility enabled but some custom 3rd party builds may not.
• GeckoTIP will not work in the Flock developer preview. It requires Flock 0.7 or later.
• Don't install GeckoTIP alongside TPCTIP or TPCISC. If you are upgrading from TPCTIP, you should uninstall TPCTIP and restart Firefox/Thunderbird before initiating installation of GeckoTIP or it may not install properly.
• If you're installing in both Firefox and Thunderbird, try closing Thunderbird down completely before installing in Firefox, and then vice versa.
• Some UMPCs might require the floattip.exe program to use floating TIP support. I did not write this program and cannot answer questions about it.
• Using the mouse gestures program StrokeIT in Firefox with GeckoTIP installed may cause an error message saying that XPCOM.DLL is missing. This can usually be fixed by locating the file XPCOM.DLL in your Firefox install folder (e.g. "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox") and making a copy of it in the windows system folder (e.g. "C:\windows\system"). If further error messages about missing .DLL files occur, repeat the process with those files as well.
• If GeckoTIP stopped working after upgrading Firefox or Windows, see below.
• GeckoTIP doesn't currently support the floating TIP under Windows Vista. Better Vista support is underway.

If the above suggestions don't help, almost all problems can be solved by doing the following:

• Close Firefox.
• Go to your Firefox profile folder. This is usually something like
  
  C:\Documents and Settings\[your windows login name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[random characters].[your profile name]
  
  Your profile name is "default" by default.
• Delete the files there named compreg.dat and xpti.dat (they will be regenerated automatically when Firefox restarts).
• Restart Firefox. The regeneration process occurs automatically when Firefox is restarted, and hopefully GeckoTIP now works.

If this still doesn't solve your problem, try the procedure described in this Microsoft knowledgebase fix, including "repairing" XP at the end.

One further possibility is a corruption or incompatibility in your Firefox profile. Try the following:
• Close Firefox
• Go to the start menu, click "Run..."
• Enter the following line into the run box exactly as it appears, INCLUDING the quotes:
  "c:\program files\mozilla firefox\firefox.exe" -profilemanager
• You should see Firefox's profile manager. Create a new profile for yourself (the old one will still be available later)
• Once Firefox is loaded with the fresh profile, install GeckoTIP, and only GeckoTIP, and restart.
• If GeckoTIP works in the new profile, there's a problem with something in your original profile. This could possibly be another extension conflicting with GeckoTIP, or a profile-related file got corrupted-- There is a bug in Firefox 1.0.x that sometimes prevents extensions from uninstalling properly, so either TPCTIP or an older GeckoTIP may not have uninstalled properly in the past and are causing problems (if you had them installed before). If you're comfortable with manually editing configuration files, you can try to properly uninstall GeckoTIP and/or TPCTIP by following this guide. You should back up your profile directory first, for safety. For your reference, the "short names" you need for the uninstall procedure are "geckotip" and "tpctip". The corresponding "GUIDs" are "{b5431952-4840-11da-9502-00e08161165f}" and "{CDF6E4A6-2E6F-4653-90BB-1998B0BACD89}".

I can be reached at:geckotip at hotmathematician.com however if you've tried everything here I probably can't help much; sorry.