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There was a power outage here earlier today that lasted long enough to shut my computer off. (I never thought I'd be asking a question about a power outage on this site, but here we are.) When I rebooted, I didn't see any error messages or major weird behavior from my computer. I'm running Windows 10 on a desktop with up-to-date Firefox (v46.0.1) as my browser.

Really the only thing that wasn't working correctly was Google, and then only some services. The actual email functions of Gmail were working fine, and I could receive messages in the Hangouts chat widget built into the Gmail sidebar, but every time I try to send a message in Gmail chat, I get the error Message not delivered.

Google Sheets was behaving oddly too, for a while. I couldn't load my main list of spreadsheets at sheets.google.com, but if I went to a specific sheet with a direct link I could read it, but it also said Trying to connect at the top of the page forever and wouldn't let me make changes. That eventually went away, I don't know why but I think hard refreshing might have helped somehow.

I've tried

  • logging out of Hangouts and logging back in, in the Gmail sidebar
  • using the standalone Hangouts text chat at hangouts.google.com, and logging out/in there
  • logging out of my Google account entirely and logging back in
  • clearing my Firefox cookies and cache
  • hard-refreshing the Gmail and Hangouts Firefox tabs

None of it has helped. All other Internet stuff works fine, as far as I can tell. Hangout chatting works fine on my cellphone for both sending and receiving, and the phone uses WiFi coming out of the same router the affected computer is Ethernet-cable-ed into. As a temporary fix I can even get outgoing chat to work from inside Gmail if I click the "Revert to old chat" link in the options menu. But if I then click "Try the new Hangouts" the error comes right back.

I'm out of ideas. What else can I do to fix chat?

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I would try uninstalling Firefox. After this download CCleaner and clean the registry. Of course, save your registry with CCleaner before making changes in case you need to revert. CCleaner is a free product and very useful when trying to clean up your system. Download it here.

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

After this reinstall Firefox and give it a shot.

Once you reinstall remember reinstall the hangouts plugin. If you don't have it you'll also need to install the Adobe Flash (latest version) player.

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  • Good ideas, but not successful. The first time I uninstalled/reinstalled Firefox, I was still logged into Gmail afterwards. They take a real strict view of the definition of "uninstall" I guess, not removing any user data. The second time I uninstalled, I also deleted the Mozilla directory under my AppData/Roaming directory, which contains the Firefox profile info, but when I got into my fresh install chat still wasn't working
    – QDQR
    May 28, 2016 at 18:01
  • Did you also use the CCleaner to clean your registery?
    – Dale
    May 28, 2016 at 20:33
  • Yes, I did. (15ch)
    – QDQR
    May 29, 2016 at 4:27
  • Did you reinstall the hangouts plugin? You also need Adobe Flash (latest version) installed.
    – Dale
    May 29, 2016 at 4:31
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    Man oh man. Turns out there was a standalone Hangouts plugin installed. I have only the very faintest memory of installing it in the first place a long long time ago. Removing it did solve the problem.
    – QDQR
    May 29, 2016 at 5:05

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