Profile in use

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This article explains how to regain access to a locked or unavailable profile, if you start your Mozilla application and see one of the following messages:

  • You see the Profile Manager and receive a message that the selected profile is already "in use".
  • A "Close Firefox", "Close Thunderbird", or (starting in SeaMonkey 2) "Close SeaMonkey" dialog box appears with one of these messages (using Firefox as an example):
    • (On Mac OS) A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time." [1] [2])
    • Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system. (shown below):


Common causes

The most common cause of this error is that your Mozilla application did not shut down properly. It might still be running in the background (even though it's not visible) or it might have closed abnormally, without deleting the lock file. To avoid conflicts, Mozilla applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla Suite/SeaMonkey are designed to allow only one copy of the application to access a profile at the same time. This is done by checking for the existence of a lock file when it starts. If the lock file already exists, the application exits with an error message. Otherwise, it creates a lock file in the profile and deletes it at exit. Normally this is completely transparent to the user; however, in the case of an abnormal shutdown, the application might not delete the lock file, preventing you from using the profile.

This error can occur in Firefox 3 because of a delayed shutdown, if you try to reopen it too soon after it was last closed. [3] [4]

Another possible cause is that your Mozilla application cannot find the profile folder because it is not in the expected location (see below).

Entering an incorrect -profile <path> command line argument will also produce this error and is commonly caused by entering -Profile Manager by mistake, (instead of the correct -ProfileManager argument) when trying to start the Profile Manager. [5] [6]

You can also get this message if you try to open a link from an external program (e.g., double-click a link in an email or HTML file) and there is a Firefox instance running that uses the default profile and that was started with the -no-remote argument (or you have the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 set). [7] [8] You should never use -no-remote to start the "default" profile. See Opening a new instance of your Mozilla application with another profile for more information.

Solutions

End processes

Go through your task or process list and stop each instance of the Mozilla application, or restart your computer. (If you need to do this on a recurring basis, read this for possible causes and solutions.)

Remove the profile lock file

The application may have shut down abnormally, leaving the lock in place. To fix this, open the profile folder and delete the file,

  • "parent.lock" (Windows),
  • "lock" and ".parentlock" (Linux), or
  • ".parentlock" (Mac OS X)

For Mac OS X: You need to use a free utility like Onyx or Maintain to turn on visibility for invisible files to show ".parentlock". This file contains no information, and deleting it will unlock the profile.

For Windows: If you attempt to delete the "parent.lock" file and receive the error, "Cannot delete parent: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable", restart the computer and run the error-checking tool Chkdsk (Windows 2000, XP) or ScanDisk (Windows 98, ME) [9].

Check the profile folder name and location

If your Mozilla application cannot find the profile folder it will report that the profile is in use or, in Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey 2, that the application "is already running, but is not responding". This can happen if you delete, rename or move the profile folder, if you run the application from removable media, or if the profile folder is stored on a network drive (bug 278860).

Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey 2 look for the profile folder based on the information stored inside the profiles.ini file (see the linked article for details). You use a text editor such as Notepad to open the "profiles.ini" file to see what information it contains. Here is an example:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/v6zui74n.default

IsRelative=1 indicates a relative path in the expected profile location, as above.

IsRelative=0 indicates a custom (absolute) profile location, for example, someone might use this to put their profile on a thumb drive or removable disk:

...
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\firefoxProf

Either edit the "profiles.ini" file to show the changed profile folder location or restore the profile folder to its original name and location.

Important: If you deleted your only profile folder, have no backup to restore and are now seeing the "already running" dialog box, delete or rename the profiles.ini file (or its parent Firefox, Thunderbird, or SeaMonkey folder) in the profile folder path. A new default profile will be created when you next start your Mozilla application.

Check access rights

This problem can also occur if you don't have the rights to edit the files in the profile (or create the lock file in the first place). Please note that this can happen if you try to use a profile from a filesystem mounted with read-only (e.g. a remote Windows share which doesn't have "allow network users to change my files" checked). This can be pretty tricky to diagnose because there is no lock file in the profile, yet the same message appears (profile in use). Incidentally, Linux users may have ~/.thunderbird and/or ~/.mozilla-thunderbird in their home directories if they have had more than one version of Thunderbird installed.

Check for other applications using the profile

SeaMonkey 1.x, Mozilla Suite, and Netscape 7 all use the same profile folder location and profile registry. If two or more of these programs are installed and you see a "profile in use" message, another of these programs may be using the profile. Try shutting down this program to unlock the profile. Additionally, you should create separate profiles for SeaMonkey 1.x, Mozilla Suite, and/or Netscape 7, as profile corruption can result if these programs share the same profile. (This problem does not occur with Firefox and Thunderbird, which do not share profiles with other applications in the same way that SeaMonkey 1.x, Mozilla Suite, and Netscape 7 do.)

Initialize the connection to a file share

If you are running Windows and store the profile on a file share try accessing the file share beforehand using Windows Explorer. Some users have reported this prevents the problem.

Restoring data from a locked profile

If you are unable to unlock the profile using the above methods, use the Profile Manager to create a new profile and transfer your data from the locked profile to the new profile.

See also

External links

Related bug reports