FireFox Failing Under Single User Profile

[DaveDubKing]

Hi, all - I've tried searching for this issue, but couldn't find any resolved answers. Hope I'm not retreading old ground.

I'm running Redhat Enterprise Server 5 on a VMWare Workstation virtual machine. Trying to set up documentum and a WebSphere App Server. Everything is working wonderfully, except that I can't seem to get my web browser to open under my dmadmin account, which is going to be one of the primary admin accounts for the machine. Given that I need this to access the web-based admin consoles for Oracle, WAS, and Documentum, this poses a fairly significant inconvenience.

If I go through the graphic environment, process on the proc bar has the text 'Starting Web Browser' which sits for 15~30 seconds, and then the process disappears entirely. If I run in terminal, I get this:

[~]$ firefox
Couldn't load XPCOM.

Under normal circumstances, I would assume there was something corrupted in my firefox install, and try re-installing it. But all the other use profiles that I log in to are able to run firefox without issue. The only thing different between the dmadmin account and the others is some additional things in PATH. I've double checked very carefully to ensure that everything that is in PATH by default is still in there, but there are a few documentum-specific directories specified as well.

Has anyone else had this problem occur with only a single user account? Any known solutions?

[DaveDubKing]

Thanks to the help of a coworker, we found the solution. Turns out it wasn't PATH, but my LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I had set this for Documentum stuff, so thought it wouldn't affect firefox, but clearly I was wrong.

Originally my LD_LIBARY_PATH read like thus:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/sparc/client:$DOCUMENTUM_SHARED/dfc:$JAVA_HOME/lib:
$DM_HOME/bin:$DOCUMENTUM/fulltext/fast:$ORACLE_HOME/lib:/usr/lib

I had imported these setting from a Solaris box that documentum was running on previously, and made some appropriate OS-related changes, but didn't think I needed to alter anything further. Clearly, firefox was finding a file of the same name as something it needed from /usr/lib in an earlier-listed path. I simply set /usr/lib to come first:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/sparc/client:$DOCUMENTUM_SHARED/dfc:
$JAVA_HOME/lib:$DM_HOME/bin:$DOCUMENTUM/fulltext/fast:$ORACLE_HOME/lib

Haven't noticed any negative impact on documentum or anything else thus far. Hopefully someone else with similar problems will find this useful at some point in the future.