Why does the Firefox download manager not show up on OSX?

When I go to Tools>Downloads, it shows up, but is completely blank (I haven't cleared it). Further, I tried downloading a large file (Eclipse), and immediatly after clicking "Save to disk", I opened Tools>Downloads again. Still blank, showing no active download, and no past activity. It's the weirdest thing. It worked fine for a while, so I'm struggling to remember exactly when it quit working, and what I might have done to break it. I've gone through my extensions, and removed almost everything that has anything to do with downloading.....but no love so far.

I don't think I've ever seen a problem like this which couldn't be solved by creating a new FireFox user profile. It's what I'd do anyway. Take a look at http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile and see if a new profile fixes it. If it does, we can go from there. Either delete something from the old profile or just import from the old to the new and dump the old.

Cool, so creating a new profile solves the problem, in that the download manager works correctly in the newly created profile. So, obviously somethings wrong in my old profile. Now the question becomes how to I save all the stuff I *do* want from my old profile, and figure out what broke the d/l manager taking that specific piece out? I figure if I just copy the original profile folder to the new one, the problem will follow me to the new profile.

Hah. Notice how I didn't answer that part in detail? You've got me. But what do you really need from the old profile? Bookmarks will be easy, just close Firefox and copy the "bookmarks.html" file from one profile to another. But if you want to go the other way, I'd start by copying your "downloads.rdf" from the new clean profile to the old, presumably broken one. This is all in /Users/<yourusername>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles, in case you didn't know.

"But what do you really need from the old profile?" - Primarily, my extensions and the configurations associated with each. In particular, I use Wizz RSS, which took quite a while to get set up the way I like/use it. I'd hate to have to go through the process of setting that up again. I did try copying just the downloads.rdf from the "good" profile to the "bad" one, but that didn't seem to really do anything. I've also gone through all the extraneous extensions that have been installed over time, but never really used. For some reason, I'm inclined to think that I've installed some extension along the way that's hosed up the built in d/l manager. It's funny, you never realize how useful that d/l manager is until you start to grab a large file, and have no indication other than the .tmp icon on your desktop of how far along you are. I guess I like seeing the little crawl bar.....makes me feel like my machine is doing something useful.

Well, all I can suggest is, perform the time-honoured process of moving just one thing, restarting, and seeing if you still have the problem. You're going to want the "Restart Firefox" extension. Remember System Extensions in OS 9 and before? I wonder if there's a meta-extension for FireFox which lets you do what the old Mac OS Extension Manager did?

I'm curious. Why don't you disable most of the FF extensions and bring the back? Disable 1/2...then the other. Actually, disable them all first. That way you'll know that you're clean.

SOLVED: Many thanks to all those who offered advice/assistance. After working with this some more, here's what I figured out, and how I resolved the issue. The problem resolved itself when a new profile was created. I didn't want to lose all my extensions/bookmarks/etc. Copying over the contents of the old profile to the new reintroduced the problem. Finally, I tried copying over all of the old contents of the non-working profile, with the exception of prefs.js. That preserved my extensions (although I did have to reconfigure them), and it preserved my RSS feeds in Wizz. Not sure what caused the corruption, but prefs.js was definitely the culprit. All is well now. Many thanks again to those who helped out.