I had this on both firefox and thunderbird. The first time it happened a reboot cured, but after a subsequent reboot it became permanent. It turned out that something had removed the executable attribute from ~/.cache (no idea what or when). None of the other threads seem to have suggested this, so I thought I should log it. Once you know where to look it is easy to see and correct.
$ ls -l ~/.cache/ ls: cannot access /home/tony/.cache/rhythmbox: Permission denied ls: cannot access /home/tony/.cache/telepathy: Permission denied ... (numerous similar errors) ... ls: cannot access /home/tony/.cache/indicator-applet.log: Permission denied ls: cannot access /home/tony/.cache/compizconfig-1: Permission denied total 0 d????????? ? ? ? ? ? checkbox/ d????????? ? ? ? ? ? chromium/ ... (numerous similar entries) ... d????????? ? ? ? ? ? winetricks/ d????????? ? ? ? ? ? xine-lib/ $ ls -ld ~/.cache drw------- 34 tony tony 4096 Mar 21 23:40 /home/tony/.cache/ $ chmod a+rwx ~/.cache $ ls -ld ~/.cache drwxrwxrwx 34 tony tony 4096 Mar 21 23:40 /home/tony/.cache/ $ ls -l ~/.cache/ total 164 drwxr-xr-x 3 tony tony 4096 Mar 7 00:06 checkbox/ drwx------ 3 tony tony 4096 Jun 29 2013 chromium/ ... (numerous similar entries) ... drwxrwxr-x 18 tony tony 4096 Feb 2 22:44 winetricks/ drwx------ 2 tony tony 4096 Mar 28 23:03 xine-lib/ $ -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to firefox in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1033437 Title: Profile won't load. Ubuntu 12.10 amd64 daily. Status in “firefox” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: when attempting to open firefox an error comes up saying "Your firefox profile cannot be loaded. it may be missing or inaccessible". i am running the daily build of ubuntu 64-bit in a virtual machine and other errors have come up. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1033437/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
