Magento - The page isn’t redirecting properly

Recently my Magento store stopped working. I could access the administrative pages as normal but entering the store as a vistor provoked the Firefox error message

"The page isn’t redirecting properly, Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete."

Googling provided little help with this problem and no answer, which is why I am writing this... so that I can save someone else the hours it took to get to a solution.

Like all things they are easy when you know how. I noticed that when the error was shown, the displayed url changed and pointed to a report file... and this was the key to the problem. Magento logs its progress through the code and logs problems to these reports. The reports are located in the var/report directory.

Examination of the report identified in the url showed me that the log_visitor table had crashed. Repairing the table fixed the problem.

Your problem may be different, but it appears that the version of magento I use does not handle errors well and ends up in an infinite redirect loop.

Moral of the story and a reminder to myself ( next time this happens ) - check the reports!