upgraded to trusty, now it thinks ff is already running

Hmm, I'm having trouble reproducing this issue. I'm running on precise, but there should be no difference between the precise and trusty behavior. Could you send me the output of:
/opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine --version
and
/opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine --patches

Also, do you have pipelight installed? (netflix-desktop will use native Firefox and pipelight if it's available)

Sure, the outputs are:

wine-1.7.17

and

8a366b6d-8ad6-4581-8aa9-66a03590a57b:2 :: Erich E. Hoover :: Implement SIO_ADDRESS_LIST_CHANGE.
92938b89-506b-430a-ba50-32de8b286e56:4 :: Erich E. Hoover :: Store and return security attributes with extended file attributes.
5d6bb7b5-ec88-4ed3-907d-9ad2173a2f88:1 :: Sebastian Lackner :: Enable/disable windows when they are (un)mapped by foreign applications.
94186fff-6dbf-44d0-8eb1-2463d1608a0f:1 :: Sebastian Lackner :: Update gl_drawable for embedded windows.
cbe240e8-2c58-430a-b61c-7fbb9d0e1e11:1 :: Sebastian Lackner :: Change return value of stub SetNamedPipeHandleState to TRUE.
00273da7-72f8-4025-9e96-0c2bc95dacdb:2 :: Maarten Lankhorst :: Winepulse patches extracted from https://launchpad.net/~mlankhorst/+archive/ppa/+files/wine1.7_1.7.10-0ubuntu1~saucy1.debian.tar.gz.
fbea4ef6-85ac-4524-b32d-fc9882b73e5a:1 :: Erich E. Hoover :: Implement GetVolumePathName.
4cd13e94-7f2d-11e3-b5eb-0090f5c75ad5:1 :: Erich E. Hoover :: Support for junction points/reparse points.
5fb1f5c8-7f17-11e3-9b62-0090f5c75ad5:1 :: Erich E. Hoover :: Implement TransmitFile.
3d7c4774-9e7f-11e3-9cfc-0090f5c75ad5:1 :: Erich E. Hoover :: Implement missing fonts expected by Silverlight.
0b21d7ac-0387-4493-aa38-fbafe3e749f5:1 :: Michael Müller :: Decrease minimum SetTimer interval from 15 to 5 ms.
19835498-8d90-4673-867e-2376af4d7c76:1 :: Sebastian Lackner :: Allow to set wined3d strictDrawOrdering via environment variable.
59bd38b7-bbdc-4cfd-9ccd-1c72c4ed84c0:1 :: Sebastian Lackner :: Implement X11DRV_FLUSH_GDI_DISPLAY ExtEscape command.
acff3012-0f75-4710-9941-08b5ce4c61f3:1 :: Erich E. Hoover :: wined3d: Silence repeated resource_check_usage FIXME.
eec5dea8-879d-417b-9f97-364deaae6576:1 :: Sebastian Lackner :: Add tests for IVMRMonitorConfig.
e46b26df-3c1b-419c-9579-f0d1e1c50bea:1 :: Sebastian Lackner :: Workaround for broken implementation of shlwapi url functions.

I do have pipelight installed, and since my original my post, I figured out that Netflix works for me on the (native Linux) Google Chrome browser, with a User Agent switcher. Thanks.

I have the exact same issue. How did you get it to work under Chrome?

Did you guys try deleting "${HOME}/.wine-browser" (rm -Rf "${HOME}/.wine-browser")?

Indeed. I actually went a step further:
rm -rf ~/.wine-browser ~/.wine-pipelight ~/.wine-pipelight64

When I upgraded to 14.04 I went with the native method instead. That worked for a while, but then it stopped working in both Firefox and Chromium. So I went back to netflix-desktop, and now I'm stuck with this error.

colan@snake[Thu 10 0:13]% /opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine --version
wine-1.7.21

The output for "/opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine --patches" is attached.

@Colan:

Its not surprising that Chromium (using Pipelight) stopped working after updating to 14.04: The latest version 34 contains a patch, which removes NPAPI support. This step was also done in the official Chromium builds at version 35. They just want that only Googles own plugins continue to work, everything else is "deprecated" and not supported anymore. They'll also do the same on Windows by the way. The easiest workaround is to use a different browser, like Firefox.

When you say it doesn't work in Firefox, I assume you mean in your native linux browser. This is also unrelated to Netflix-Desktop then. Please check the diagnostic page http://fds-team.de/pipelight and select Silverlight to find out whats wrong. I suspect that you either have to clear the plugin cache (can happen when files are overwritten while the browser is still opened, run "sudo pipelight-plugin --create-mozilla-plugins" to fix it), or you're missing a useragent switcher ( http://pipelight.net/cms/installation-user-agent.html#section_2 ). If this doesn't help for pipelight, feel free to create a question in the corresponding answer tracker, and we'll give some more ideas: https://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight

Concerning Netflix-Desktop: Deleting the wineprefix should normally be sufficient. Did you run the delete command as the right user? You should run it within the same user account you're using to run the program itself (_not_ root!). If this doesn't help please provide some more information about which Linux firefox version you have installed.

dpkg --list | grep firefox

Regards,
Sebastian

@Sebastian:

I've given up completely on Chromium because that support was dropped, but neither netflix-desktop nor Firefox native work for me. I'll open an issue on Answers for the native method if I can't get netflix-desktop resolved here.

The version of FF I'm using is now 31.0+build1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 as it just came through updates, but the same thing happened with the previous version(s).

I'm not deleting those files as root, just as me. After they're cleared out, I run netflix-desktop, it tries to do the install, and then dies with the pop-up "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system." The same thing happens on successive runs of netflix-desktop.

What's interesting is that when I run it from the command line, the last thing that shows up before the pop-up is:
rm: cannot remove ‘/home/colan/.wine-browser/drive_c/browser-profile/pluginreg.dat’: No such file or directory

Does that help? Thanks.

Unfortunately it doesn't really help. Does the problem persist all the time, even when deleting for example ~/.wine-browser, or does it work a few times before it starts again?

I would suspect that this problem doesn't have anything to do with Pipelight itself, but instead with a remaining lock on the firefox profile directory. Do you maybe use some other extension or plugin which prevents Firefox from shutting down properly?

Please check the following article, and try if one of the suggestions helps in your case:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-responding#w_firefox-hangs-when-you-quit-it

Hi Colan,

That's intentional behavior for netflix-desktop - it deletes the plugin registry every time it loads (at least when you use pipelight it does). I'm really confused as to why it would do this to you, as you have almost exactly my use case...

Oh, after it fails to load (without deleting ~/.wine-browser) you might try running:
firefox -no-remote -profile "${HOME}/.wine-browser/drive_c/browser-profile"

This will allow you to launch the browser with the appropriate profile without the netflix-desktop script resetting everything each time it loads. That way you can try things like deleting lockfiles in that folder (part of the directions you'll find) and see if that helps. It shouldn't make a difference though, as there's no lockfile in the system-wide folder that it uses to create that folder.

When I run FF normally, I never have a problem with locks or anything of the sort. It starts and shuts down normally. I only run into this problem with netflix-desktop, every single time, even after deleting all of those files.

When I run this, I get the same pop-up.
firefox -no-remote -profile "${HOME}/.wine-browser/drive_c/browser-profile"

What's interesting is that there's a .parentlock file there. So I delete it, run the command again, and the same thing happens. Then I check the directory, and the lock file is there again. It seems as though the command is adding the lock file, and then telling me that someone else locked it.

Does that make any sense to anyone?

Hi Colan,

I understand what you're saying, but I understand why FF would do that, in this case you're bypassing all of the netflix-desktop setup. Could you give me the list of files in "${HOME}/.wine-browser/drive_c/browser-profile" ? Maybe we can try deleting some of them and seeing if it makes FF cooperate.

extensions/
extensions.ini*
extensions.sqlite
localstore.rdf
.parentlock
prefs.js

Thanks.

Odd, try this:
cd ~/.wine-browser/drive_c/
rm -Rf browser-profile
cp -a /usr/share/wine-browser-installer/browser-profile browser-profile
firefox -no-remote -profile "${HOME}/.wine-browser/drive_c/browser-profile"

Same result. :(

Ok, try this:
cd ~/.wine-browser/drive_c/
rm -Rf browser-profile
cp -a /usr/share/wine-browser-installer/browser-profile browser-profile
rm -Rf browser-profile/extensions*
firefox -no-remote -profile "${HOME}/.wine-browser/drive_c/browser-profile"

@Erich: I never got around to trying the above before upgrading to 14.10. Afterwards, I no longer ran into this bug, but I got the message saying that my system isn't compatible.

That's fine, because I got Netflix working natively with Google Chrome 38. I normally use Chromium, but having to open another browser to run Netflix isn't that big of a deal. Sounds like the lack of DRM in the open-source version causes it not to work.

Thanks for all of your help through this.