Just wanted to post a solution I found to the highly annoying problem of GMail crashing Firefox when you close a GMail tab or move away from GMail.
If you google for this error, you’ll see most sites agree, including the Mozilla team, that the GMail Talk Plugin is causing this error. The solution is to disable Google Talk. Just look under your Add-ons and uninstall GoogleTalk.
The only problem is I don’t have Google Talk installed. So now what?
To find out that GoogleTalk is definitely the cause, you’ll first need to check the firefox crash report to make sure it is reporting GoogleTalk or UserCallWinProcCheckWOW. You need to report the error using the Mozilla Crash Reporter (the box that pops up on a crash that asks if you want to report the error). Report it and then look at the crash log. If you don’t report the error, it will not appear in your crash log.
To access the crash log, just type “about:crashes” into your browser. It’ll open a screen like this
Click on the last report ID and it’ll open the bug report on mozilla.com. You are looking for what caused the crash – in my case it says the Google Talk Plugin.
This confirmed that the GoogleTalkPlugin was causing my problem but how could it cause the problem when I didn’t have it installed?
After some more “Gmail Crashes Firefox” Google searches, I came across a thread that talked about all kinds of complex backup and profile recreating. I really didn’t want to do that. I try to leave profile testing as a last resort. However, this caused me to go look in my plugins folder to see if there were any GoogleTalk files. I found a remnant GoogleTalk file in there. I removed it and the GMail crashing Firefox immediately stopped happening.
C:\Users\your account\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\plugins
The file I removed was called “nptalkplugin.dll”.
GMail crashes stopped.