UPDATE: It looks like NewEgg realized its mistake and is fixing it.

Well, this is a new one on me. Firefox and Gmail are fighting over a message from NewEgg. Apparently, someone at NewEgg decided that you needed to enter a username & password to view some portion of their new email advertisement. So when it landed in my Gmail inbox I opened it, just to get the lowdown on their "Last Chance for Back-to-School Bargains" - hey I might get a free flash drive or something.

That was a mistake. Firefox decided to throw up an endless barrage of "Authentication Required" dialog boxes asking for a username & password that I don't have. OK, I thought, I'll just hit cancel a couple of times and it will go away. Nope. After hitting Cancel, OK, and trying to type anything and everything in the required fields all I got was more dialog boxes. Hmmm... maybe its because I'm using Minefield (Firefox 3.1a2). Nope. Changing to Firefox 3.0.1 still gives me the never ending dialog box storm. And since Firefox is set to open my last set of tabs I didn't even get the chance to delete the Gmail message before it dialog boxed me to death.

The only way out for me was to open a different browser (Safari), log into Gmail, and delete the message. First though I wanted to do a little investigation and see how Safari would handle this situation. After I opened the offending message, Safari threw up the Auth dialog box two or three times and then stopped bothering me about it. Problem solved. I could have also gone to the command line and opened Firefox in "safe" mode with a different profile, but that wouldn't have been as much fun and too much work. :)

Anyway, this is just a warning to everyone to watch out for the Gmail messages that can lock out Firefox. And to NewEgg to fix their processes.