Mozilla update problems
Nov 6th 2007Wallabynerd alert
For the past six months or so, every time I’ve tried updating Firefox or Thunderbird (on Windows) to the latest version, it’s had problems: The file firefox.exe (or thunderbird.exe) is in use. Well, of course I wasn’t running FF at the time, so that wasn’t it. This included a clean boot and I carefully shut down everything that might’ve been accessing it… still “in use”.
Sometimes it worked to unpack the installer (7zip works well) and copy everything from “localized” and “non-localized” into the right folder in Program Files. Sometimes, not always.
Finally figured it out: It’s TeaTimer, which is part of Spybot SD. TeaTimer works to keep important programs from being modified. Apparently someone decided that changes to FF and TB - including authorized installs of an upgraded version from the same source - should be considered harmful. (It didn’t protect me from similarly-frequent upgrades of the GIMP, Pidgin, Notepad++, gvim, 7zip, Inkscape, and whatever else I’ve been using lately.)
So if you disable TeaTimer (easiest way is just to stop it entirely), then the Mozilla updates go as planned, including the auto-updates.
Hadn’t seen this solution posted anywhere else, so I thought I’d share 
dad on 10 Nov 2007 at 11:36 am #
Thanks for the timely solution! I was just in the process of updating FF when I read it. I quickly shut down tea-timer and then restarted FF: No trouble.
You probably already have let Dr. Kolla know, I expect.