Took me more than a week to figure this out...
Problem:
When using Chrome's sync function using Google's account, Chrome does not shutdown gracefuly, leaving zombie process in Ubuntu OS.
The zombie process, somehow, prevents Chrome to load account data, and reports,
Your profile could not be opened correctly...
When this happens, Chrome fails to load any of the password, cookies, from the past history, even if it is on the local data. This is very annoying.
Find out the cause:
After Googled around, found out how to kill the zombie process:
pkill -9 chrome
Then,
found Chrome's history data is causing this, so removing it should help:
rm -rf .config/google-chrome/Default/History*
These worked fine, but when Chrome synchronize the account, the History data came back, and the problem occurs again.
To summarize the situation,
some
bad data in History is the cause of this problem,
and the
bad data is in the Google Sync (up somewhere),
so
Chrome sync always downloads the bad data.
OK, the solution is
to erase the bad data from Google account.
I tried to erase the sync'ed data from Chrome's Preference menu. But nothing worked. So, I dived into the Google's maze of account setting pages...
This worked for me:
0) disconnect from Google Account.
Not sure if this is necessary, but I was disconnected when I did the following.
1) login to Google Account Setting.
I used this url to get into my account setting.
https://www.google.com/settings/
no link, I found so far.
2) turn off the Google Sync
From the account setting page, click on "Profile and privacy".
then, scroll down to "Sign in to Dashboard" and click.
find "Chrome Sync", and click on "Stop sync and delete data from Google" or something
(well I'm a Japanese, and I changed the language to English to write this entry. But this page was still in Japanese. so I cannot be sure how the link is written in English.)
wait for a few minutes according to the message.
3) delete web history
From the account setting page, click on "Go to web history".
Click on "Remove all Web History", and clicked just yes to whatever the question was.
4) start Chrome and synchronization
and it worked for me!
The Google account pages were just like a maze.
So, many of the above may change at anytime. But I hope that this list gives some clue about this problem.
[additional note: 2012/04/20]
The same problem happened again, about two weeks after I wrote this blog entry. So, I stopped syncing 'address bar history', and the problem went away (for now).
