update:

with Admin Bar deactivated I deleted the plugin via FTP. I then downloaded a the latest version from this site just to be certain I was installing the most recent version. Then reinstalled Admin Bar and activated it. Went to try and view the forum page and it crashed the browser again. Went back in to the admin panel and deactivated the Simple Press Admin Bar plugin and the forum page loads properly again. So the reinstall didn’t work

How do you recommend I proceed?

things dont just stop working… something must have changed… wp update? wp themes or plugins? sp plugins? have you upgraded anything?

not really sure how it could crash a browser either…

The SP Admin Bar was working for at least a week and a half post any and all updates and upgrades (haven’t done any for a while). Also, no new plugins were added. Yesterday when I clicked on the forum page (every browser I tried it in) responded by locking up. How they reacted: the browser would attempt to load the page, get stuck, and then cease working, and lock up or ‘crash’. Deactivating SP Admin Bar fixed the problem. Then reactivating it caused the same lock up. So I thought possibly the file was corrupt and I deactivated it, deleted it via FTP and then reinstalled. After reinstall the same issue occurred so I deactivated it again.

Not sure how it could lock up the browsers either but it did, and on two different platforms no less. If it wasn’t a membership site I’d recreate it and do a video screen capture so you could see it for yourself.

Yes it’s unusual for things to just stop working but I have seen it before due to file corruption so that’s why I tried the reinstall. Haven’t experienced it due to anything else other than that and an incompatibility. At this point I’ll just guess there is some sort of incompatibility but then again why would it work for a week and a half before acting this way? No way to know. But I do know it’s not working.

OK this is very weird. Th Admin Bar doesn’t, by itself, do anything – just displays some buttons! All the work is only performed when you click a button and it goes off to make Ajax requests.

I realise you don’t want your site crashing but would it be possibly to briefly activate it… run a page and let it crash and then view the html source code that was produced. It is possible that at the end of whatever output did make it will be a php ‘Fatal Error’ notice. Worth look for if possible. Deactivate it straight after of course. Oh – and this should only get loaded for admins anyway of course although that might depend on the cause.

Sorry for the long delay in responding. I was out.

One problem (so far) turned out to be WP-Drip and it was causing issues with more than just SP. Yes very odd that it affected SP Admin Bar the way it did. Tested Admin Bar again and it was having issues with a minify plugin. deactivated WP-Drip (for a BUNCH of reasons) and the minify plugin and Admin Bar no longer crashes the browser. I did figure there must be some incompatibility issues somewhere since a reinstall didn’t show some sort of corrupt file but odd, just odd. We have a whole new site that all this is migrating to and everything is working there so hopefully all of this is moot anyway. Hopefully won’t have to deal with the old version of the site much longer.

current: WordPress 3.5 | PHP 5.2.17 on cgi-fcgi

new one being built that everything is working on: WordPress 3.5 | PHP 5.3.6-13ubuntu3.6 on apache2handler

Entirely possible the PHP version is making all the difference.

with minify plugins, you really need to tell it not to minify the forum js… our js already comes minified and trying to do it again just causes problems…

okay, let us know when all sorted on new server…