[gutsy tribe-2] firefox doesn't create profile if not present

Binary package hint: firefox

This bug is a duplicate of 123917 and 124262 but reporting a new bug like this seems to be necessary for the maintainers.

This is a vanilla gutsy tribe-2 install from the cd. It was installed from scratch, not upgraded. Firefox won't start if there isn't already a profile in place. The version info is

gavinmc@balti:~$ apt-cache policy firefox
firefox:
  Installed: 2.0.0.4+2-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 2.0.0.4+2-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.0.4+2-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://ie.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Of course, in order to report this bug, I had to create the profile by a different means (a copy from a backup).

At the point that the profile creation fails see screenshot in bug 124262 a directory .mozilla/firefox has been created with two files which look to have the standard name scheme given to profile folders.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Jul 12 21:57:31 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.10
Package: firefox 2.0.0.4+2-0ubuntu3
PackageArchitecture: i386
SourcePackage: firefox
Uname: Linux balti 2.6.22-7-generic #1 SMP Mon Jun 25 17:33:14 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux