Firefox 3 won't start after upgrade

The system is windows XP with SP3 and after upgrade from an earlier version, Firefox 3 won't start. It crashes immediately after I type the "firefox" command in a CMD window before showing the browser window or an error message.

After a search in the internet, I found the problem is similar to what's described here: Firefox 3 will not start if you have not set the Profile Manager to automatically start Firefox with a selected profile. As a workaround, open the Profile Manager, select a profile, place a check mark in the "Don't ask at Startup" option and then start Firefox with that profile, to set it as the default.

This worked for me. I just type in "firefox -p" in the Start->Run window to start the Firefox profile manager,and the following window appears:


I then clicked on the button "Start Firefox" and the familiar firefox browser window shows up again!