The compreg.dat and xpti.dat files are created the first time you run
firefox when your profile is created, or are recreated after you update
firefox or install an extension. On Windows, using folder redirection,
the %appdata% folder is put on a network server, so the users firefox
profile is on the server. Firefox is writing the compreg.dat and
xpti.dat files one line at a time for a total of over 3000 writes. The
total size of the files is only a couple hundred KB. This high number of
small size writes over a network connection can be VERY taxing. Why cant
Firefox pre-create the files in memory, and write them to the file
system with one write command? This should improve the general startup
speed of firefox, no matter where its writing the files.

The affects us because we use roaming profiles in Windows. Roaming
profiles means that the users entire Windows profile will move with them
from computer to computer, this Windows profile contains the users
firefox profile too. When firefox is installed, it writes the time
stamps of certain files in the firefox program directory, into the
compreg.dat and xpti.dat files. With firefox being installed onto 1000
computers at different times, the time stamps on the files will be
different. Since the compreg.dat and xpti.dat files are stored in the
users profile, the time stamps contained in them will never match whats
on each computer. So this means the compreg.dat and xpti.dat files get
recreated every time the user starts firefox. In our environment,
depending on network and server performance, this can cause a 3 to 30
second delay in the startup of firefox. Even longer the first time
someone runs firefox, because it seems to create the files twice.

This affects thunderbird too.

I believe this to be a bug, what are the proper channels to report this?

Tested with:
Windows XP SP2 (client)
Windows Server 2003 R2 (server)
Firefox 1.5.0.9
Firefox 2.0.0.1
Thunderbird 1.5.0.9


Thanks
Steven Foley