While developing and testing video/audio features for the PR project I found WMP caused Firefox to crash consistently upon closing (video/audio would play once, then any subsequent actions resulted in a browser crash).
Error (something to the extent of):
Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Library
This plug-in has performed an illegal operation…
This did not occur in the previous PR release, so I’m guessing it may represents an incompatibility between WMP and more recent Firefox updates. I found this related technote (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Windows_Media_Player#Installing_the_new_plugin) which accurately described the problem I was having. I tested the plug-in and surprisingly it worked. I say surprisingly because the download site seems to be almost a year old. In addition, the new plug-in seems to be able to manage the configuration settings better than before. I’d like to suggest this plug-in be added to future updates for the rest of the department, but we may want to find out if others experience similar issues with WMP under the latest release of FF (2.0.0.12) and/or what specifically is causing the crash. I have my theories, but with the new plug-in I may not be able to test them. I’d like to know if anyone else encounters this.
Plug-in Download site: http://port25.technet.com/pages/windows-media-player-firefox-plugin-download.aspx
While it seemed this plug-in resolved the error mentioned above, the error reappeared yesterday. I tried reinstalling the plug-in, but it did not have any effect. Additional testing determined the error occurred whenever I tried to over-write the player object html. It’s possible whatever mechanism the player uses to close/unload the object has a bug or is conflicting with something. I still don’t know the root cause of the problem, but a work-around is to clear the contents of the parent container using innerHTML or equivalent loading any new scripts.