Firefox locked for one user -- How to clear?

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Tue, 08 May 2007, Scott Ledyard wrote:

> About once a week, a student approaches me and says that Firefox is
> broken. When you try to run Firefox, a message comes up that says that
> it's already running.  Re-logging in does not help. The end-of-day
> reboot does! This was a problem in Edubuntu thin client 6.10 and now
> in 7.04.

Firefox stops people from running it twice on the same profile.  This is to
prevent nasty behaviour such as two copies of firefox trying to both modify
your bookmarks file at the same time.

You can do:

ps aux |grep firefox

to see what firefox processes are lying around.  If you see one under that
person's username, you probably need to kill it before they can start
another.

Gavin