Error running Firefox 3

This is a tech blog:

One of the reasons why people should use Linux .. is that although you get stuck here more than you do in windows.. help is more readily available for Linux.

After a useless one day I spent on Windows (in spite of the fact a deadly virus was circulating through Gtalk, and me answering everyone affected who stumbled upon me for help to use Linux)... I had to run Firefox (outdated) 2 again as Firefox 3 just wouldn't run on my Mandriva system.

A little history:
The Mandriva installation before last had a smoothly running Firefox 3. I was then unaware that Firefox 3 was available in the URPMI repositories as well so I always installed from source. After reinstalling Mandriva however, Firefox 3 just wouldn't run (nothing would happen when i clicked the icon). So I tried running from the terminal and I got this error:

Error: in guard: symbol required but got: Error: fatal: looped fatal error

I googled this and found out that this was a very common error... but no one had the solution for it.... ( i mean there were a few solutions mentioned but none worked for me)

That day I discovered that URPMI had Firefox 3.0.1 and I installed it. Soon the system closed my Firefox 2 window and there it was Firefox 3. Up and running.

That evening when I reopened my Firefox 3 browser, nothing happened.... I tried it from my terminal,

Error: in guard: symbol required but got: Error: fatal: looped fatal error

That was it... I did not have any more enthu that day to pursue this any further.

So back to today:
I decided to give the situation another try when I was downloading a funny video I liked called Benny Lava which was actually a Tamil Prabhu Deva song some guy called Buffalax had thought would sound in English. Download speed was slow for the video so I had to use DownThemAll (the download manager for Firefox).

Google was having the same set of search results as the lst time so I used Mibbit to connect to #firefox in irc.mozilla.org and placed my situation. Someone called mzz replied and he looked for the source of the error message. He first checked the Firefox source code, then the Gtk and finally the shell source code.

The solution:
Then he came up with a search result that said uninstalling uim (whatever that was ) would help... I did that .. and voila Firefox 3 is up and running again...

Thanks mzz. (whoever you are)