[SOLVED] Firefox and Thunderbird intermittently runs without a window

I'm having an intermittent problem with Firefox and Thunderbird. When I attempt to launch either firefox or thunderbird the respective application will show up in htop (I see a bunch of firefox threads) but no window appears and the CPU load is 0%. When the application (Firefox or Thunderbird) is running but not visible, the mouse and keyboard remain fully functional; e.g. I can launch a new terminal and switch work-spaces without trouble. Repeatedly killing the application and restarting it will sometimes result in the application loading properly (i.e. I get a fully functional window with working menus, etc).
I'm currently using Firefox version 8.0.1 and Thunderbird version 8.0 with the i3 window manager on my Macbook 5,1 (with nvidia drivers). I did a full system update about a month ago. I've not experienced this problem on my workstation: a custom built AMD system with ATI graphics. Both my macbook and custom workstation are using the same versions of i3, Firefox, and Thunderbird.
I did a little experiment and temporarily switch over to fluxbox for a while. While using fluxbox I was unable to replicate the symptoms; both Firefox and thunderbird appear to work fine. But, since the problem is "random" it is hard to say for sure if this was just a coincidence.
I tried launching firefox and thunderbird from a terminal: no errors or output of any kind are printed to the terminal even when the application window does not appear. Launching Firefox in safemode does not appear to have any influence.
I saw a similar bug report on the mozilla website dating back a few years (version 3.0 I believe of Firefox). But I didn't see any links to a solution or explanation of the problem.
Any advise on how to debug this?
Thanks in advance.
(I appoligize if this has already been addressed somewhere else. My search attempts did not yield any relevant hits.)
EDIT: marked as solved
Last edited by bsilbaugh (2012-03-14 23:23:52)

I recently did a full system update, which includes a kernel upgrade (from 3.0 to 3.2), and the symptoms have disappeared. Firefox and Thunderbird appear to be functioning normally.
It's still not clear what was causing the original problem. I guess I'll just have to live with the mystery.

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[SOLVED] firefox and thunderbird freeze

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The output is mostly gibberish to me but it did help
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[SOLVED] Firefox and Thunderbird intermittently runs without a window

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