I’d have never thought that Kaspersky 2009 product is the culprit that causes Firefox 3 to crash randomly mainly because some people reported that they experienced Firefox 3 crashing on a newly installed Windows with a new Firefox profile. I could only remember that Firefox 3 RC1 was running perfectly fine and the crashing problem only started when I was using RC2. At first I thought that the crashing problem is caused by Firefox RC2 but I was wrong. I totally forgotten that Kaspersky 2009 products was released on 8th of June, which is 4 days later after installing Firefox 3 RC2.

Fix Firefox 3 Crash Solution

The reason why I did not suspect that Kaspersky is the cause of the crashing problem is because I totally disabled Kaspersky from startup. Again, I was wrong. Even though I’ve disabled Kaspersky from startup, it will still load some DLL files belonging to Kaspersky such as mzvkbd.dll, kloehk.dll, adialhk.dll and etc which will not be visible in Windows Task Manager.

After spending many hours in checking and testing, I am pretty sure that this time I’ve found the fix for Firefox 3 crashing problem.

You can try replicating the problem yourself if you have Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 or Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 with Firefox 3. Simply login to web based Gmail and try closing the tab. Firefox 3 should crash. Another problem which mEtRiX, our forum moderator is experiencing is when he clicks the Bookmarks from the menu bar, it opens the add bookmark dialog window instead of the bookmark drop down list.
Firefox 3 bookmarks menu bar problem

All this Firefox 3 crashing problem is caused by Kaspersky Internet Security’s new feature called Virtual Keyboard which is used for safe entry of logins and passwords to prevent keystroke logging.
Disable Kaspersky Virtual Keyboard
Kaspersky has confirmed the bug and they are in the midst of testing the fixed version which will be released in the coming weeks. I certainly can’t wait any longer because it is affecting my web browsing experience and I don’t want to use Opera or Internet Explorer. I had no choice but to look for a solution. I found a solution which I’ve tested for a few days and not a single Firefox 3 crash ever since.

1. Download Sysinternals AutoRuns for Windows.

2. Extract and run autoruns.exe

3. Click AppInit tab and uncheck C:\Progra~1\Kasper~1\Kasper~1\mzvkbd.dll
Disabled Kaspersky mzvkbd.dll

4. Restart your computer.

Kaspersky Virtual Keyboard feature is only available for Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 but weirdly people who has Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 installed is also affected by this. Some people has reported that mzvkbd.dll file (the cause of Firefox 3 crash) is loaded onto the system even when they are using KAV 2009. One of the Kaspersky forum moderator admitted that they were included by mistake and will probably removed for good in the next build.

It is absolutely safe in disabling mzvkbd.dll using Sysinternals Autoruns. When there is a new update for Kaspersky that fixes this problem, I’d advice you to enable back the DLL file.

Thanks to bahamot for suggesting to me that Kaspersky might be the culprit which made me start investigating the problem from there.

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