A friend told me that Firefox stopped working. It stated when launching Firefox that it could not load firefox profile and that another instance of it was running. With no other instances running I asked him what was the last thing you did before it broke. He stated that he was hiding his data from others when it broke. I then looked into his system and his user profile was hidden from view even when logged in as him in C:\users for Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
I asked him if he hid his profile and he said yes. I went into Windows and showed him how easy it is for anyone else to see hidden in the control panel properties for the system and then his profile was exposed to be hidden.
I went to properties of his profile folder and unchecked hidden and it took about a minute to unhide all files and folders contained within it.
Then went to launch firefox and firefox loaded with no problems.
So for some odd reason Firefox doesnt like the user profile with hidden attribute. I personally would have thought that it shouldnt matter if the files and folders were hidden because they still remained with read/write permissions, but nope... If the user profile is hidden with all files and folders also tagged to have hidden attribute, it breaks Firefox version 40.0.1
Figured I'd share this in case anyone else ever tries to hide their profile and data and gets in the same jam.
Here is the procedure to show hidden files/folders globally on the PC
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files#show-hidden-files=windows-7
