Classic. You’d think that it’d be “easy” to upgrade to Firefox 1.5 from 1.04 (ok, I had a somewhat older build). No way.

Yesterday I figured it’d take me about a hour or so to get 1.5 up and running with all my extensions and themes installed. I started out by backing up my old version (thank goodness), then uninstalled it, download 1.5, install it, double clicked on the Firefox icon and… nothing. Won’t start. So after three or four attempts at uninstalling 1.5, reinstalling it, rebooting, etc., it still won’t run. It shows up for few seconds in the Task Manager as a process (firefox.exe), but then just disappears from the list. Great.

I figure it’s got to be something with the my registry. Hold crap Batman. Turns out that my registry is full of references to Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird (which I also uninstalled just in case) and friggin’ even Netscape (I have never installed Netscape’s browser on my machine). No way I can clean up all of the registry crap. Somewhere along the line, Firefox/Phoenix(the old name/builds) has polluted the registry to the point where 1.5 now won’t work.

A quick web/blog search for a similar problem yielded notta.

Well, it was getting to be time to reinstall Windows, since my current build is over a year old. Yes sports fans, Windows gets progressively slower and less reliable the more you run it — and Microsoft better fix this in Vista, but probably won’t.

1.04 doesn’t look that bad to me now.