Sunday, October 14, 2007

Fixing the red menu_HelpPopup_reportertoolmenu error in Netscape Navigator

A friend told me today his Netscape Navigator is screwed. The main window showed in the bottom a red error message <menuitem id="menu_HelpPopup_reportertoolmenu"

menu_HelpPopup_reportertoolmenu

I was about to tell him to disable his Navigator Add-Ons, when Netscape downloaded and upgraded my Navigator from build 9.0b3 to 9.0rc1, and I started seeing the same problem.

I searched a bit the net and found out the menu_HelpPopUp_reportertoolmenu is related to a Reporter add-on that ships with SeaMonkey (who came up with this name anyway?!). The Website Reporter Tool [Help-->Report Broken Web Site] that is used by Netscape and Firefox does not select correctly its language sometimes and cause this error to appear.

There were a couple of solutions proposed:
- delete a file chrome.cdf in your profile (more info)
- switch to another language and back (more info)
- uninstall the extension (more info) either by manually messing with the same chrome.cdf or using Chrome Manager

None of the proposed solutions worked for me (I don't have a chrome.cdf file in my profile or at least I didn't find it, I have no idea how to switch languages or at least what I've tried had no effect, I had no add-ons installed for Netscape that I could uninstall, and the Chrome Manager part of Mnenhy installed but was hanging up on opening the manager window).

What worked eventually for me was:
- Close Netscape Navigator
- Go to C:\Program Files\Netscape\Navigator 9\chrome folder (or the Chrome subfolder of your Navigator install folder)
- Locate 2 files reporter.jar and Reporter.manifest and delete them
- Restart Netscape Navigator and the red <menuitem id="menu_HelpPoppp_reportertoolmenu" error message should be now gone.

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