Opera Freezes Comp
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jarodsafehouse71 last edited by
Hi
This evening, my laptop suddenly stopped responding. Nothing worked and I wound up having to shut off via the power button.
Now, Opera won't load AT ALL (I was using the last build of v12), nor will it let me uninstall it. Loading or trying to uninstall Opera continually freezes my laptop.
Any suggestions you can give me?
What can I do to at least retrieve my bookmarks?? I found the .abr file in app data folder but since it's not an HTML file, I can't import into another browser.
Any and all help is much appreciated!
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blackbird71 last edited byAt this point, it's hard to say what happened. Any time a computer hangs up hard and requires a power-reboot, there's the risk that files were corrupted during the operations. If Opera wasn't running at the time of the crash, it's possible the OS registry became corrupted and is now blocking Opera; if Opera was running at the time of the crash, it's possible some of its critical files were corrupted because they didn't close properly. And there's always the possibility something on the hard drive failed and damaged Opera's files, independent of anything else.
One possible remedy to try would be a fresh, new installation of Opera 12.16 (assuming it's the one you had on the system before). In reinstalling, however, be sure to put it into a folder named differently than the original installation (which most people leave as the prompted name \"opera")... something new like \opera1216, etc. If you install it into the originally-named folder, it will auto-import all the files it can from the old installation, probably including some corrupted files. Also, if it asks, don't let it automatically import any data from the old installation. Assuming it successfully installs and runs OK, you should be able to turn it off and then copy your bookmarks.adr file from the original app data Opera folder to the new-named app data folder, over-writing the new one the new installation created. I would avoid copying the operaprefs.ini, vlink4.dat, or any sessions files from the old to the new installation - they may readily carry in some corruption if you do.
If a fresh install gets Opera back up and working, you'll need to decide what, if anything, to do with the old installation... there's nothing really wrong with leaving it in place, but deleting all links to it (making sure not to accidentally take out anything pointing to the new installation). Otherwise, you can try removing it using specialty tools (like CCleaner, etc), but you must then be very careful to not mess up the new installation at the same time... the names of the two installations may be very similar in some of the registry entries. One can always simply delete its folders from the drive to recover some space, leaving dead-end stubs in the registry... but again, be sure to delete only the old installation's folders.
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artmil last edited by
If its on windows the first thing i would suggest before doing anything else is chkdsk /R.
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jarodsafehouse71 last edited by
blackbird,
Thanks so much for all of the information. Opera WAS running at the time of the hard freeze and had been acting squirrelly for weeks beforehand.
I decided I would give Opera 18 a try (hated 15 which is why I stuck with 12). I'm actually liking a few of 18s features and have decided to stick with it since I can at least have my bookmarks with it, and will try to remove Opera 12 either with CCleaner or just deleting it's files and letting TuneUp Utilities clean up the registry.
Should I also delete those Opera 12 files in AppData?
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blackbird71 last edited by
It indeed sounds as if the Opera installation had been malfunctioning, finally blew up, and "chewed up its gears", taking down the computer in the process.
Whether to delete the Opera 12 files in AppData is up to you. Files just sitting there merely take up a tiny amount of hard disk space... and, of themselves, aren't going to do any harm. It's unclear if you've imported your bookmarks into your New Opera installation. If not, you may want to leave alone the version 12 AppData files for now, in case you do eventually want to try importing them. Otherwise, you can either leave them or blow them away once you've disposed of the other Opera 12 remnants... it's up to you.
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biggerabalone last edited by
i tried to uninstall my opera 12.16 and had problems. my computer froze up and the uninstall wouldn't complete. i opened a task manager and found opera had opened over 40 opera.exe processes and kept opening more as i kept trying to kill them. i forcefully powered off and rebooted. tried to uninstall again and experienced the same thing. this time i used winpatrol to kill the repeating opera processes (it kills them all at the same time). the uninstall had failed, but i regained functionality (computer wasn't frozen). i was uninstalling with revo unistaller, so when i regained functionality, it did a scan for leftovers and removed everything. i was concerned that it may have missed pieces and wanted a proper uninstall. so i reinstalled opera 12.16 and experienced the same problems when trying to uninstall. i used the same remedy to fix it again. something is definitely buggy.
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blackbird71 last edited by
From where did you download your 12.16 Opera program, and did you re-use that download when you attempted to reinstall it?
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biggerabalone last edited by
Originally posted by blackbird71:
From where did you download your 12.16 Opera program, and did you re-use that download when you attempted to reinstall it?
downloaded from opera site: http://www.opera.com/download/guide/?ver=12.16
it was downloaded for purpose of reinstall (after failed uninstall)- original install was many, many years old. this is on a windows 7 64 bit system.
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blackbird71 last edited by
Originally posted by biggerabalone:
Originally posted by blackbird71:
From where did you download your 12.16 Opera program, and did you re-use that download when you attempted to reinstall it?
downloaded from opera site: http://www.opera.com/download/guide/?ver=12.16
it was downloaded for purpose of reinstall (after failed uninstall)- original install was many, many years old. this is on a windows 7 64 bit system.Ouch! Well, Opera's site is THE place to get a clean download, and if the same Opera problems recurred after downloading a "fresh" copy from there, that doesn't bode well. Was the 12.16 installation misbehaving before you attempted uninstalling the first time (and if so, how)? I guess another question to ask is what OS/version and anti-virus brand/version are you running? At first blush, the uninstall repetitive-process-startup issue reminds me of something in Opera's uninstaller being blocked, leading it to retry over and over again.
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biggerabalone last edited by
no, opera wasn't causing any problems, i just decided on that system to remove the `growingly' obsolete software: it was my windows 7 system and i was playing with various replacement browsers, and had finally decided to use an opera-ized firefox (via extensions) as my default- though i'm still playing around and could switch to seamonkey???? (still playing with opera's mail program and haven't decided on whether to keep it or not). opera 19 is still on my system, but is looking increasingly irrelevant compared to firefox. i still use opera 12.16 on my linux, i find it faster than chomium and firefox, and security isn't as concerning on that system. so long story short ... opera 12 removed from my windows 7 for acceptance of inevitable.
on that system, antivirus is mse and webroot. additionally have winpatrol and spyshelter to harden system. problem may have come from spyshelter, though logs don't indicate this. but spyshelter can run browsers with limited user rights. this post interested me because there was some similarity in the problems. so i suggested my fix.
inversely jarodsafehouse71, if your problems only occur when opera is started, try my above suggestion. if your problems occur immediately with startup of system, you likely have other problems. you could try starting in safemode and tackle your problems from there. uninstall opera 12 to see if it was the root of your problems - if not you can always reinstall. scan your system for malware. make sure there are no updates for your drivers (or for windows in general). think about if you recently installed something new that might be causing conflicts and uninstall it to check (perhaps your antivirus just had a big, bad update?). if all else fails, it might be time for a system restore point (its so much easier than trying to figure it out, sometimes).
and for bookmarks etc. try: favbackup: http://download.cnet.com/FavBackup/3000-2242_4-10946542.html?tag=mncol;1
i used it with success in the past.
