Recently Loaded Mozilla Firefox, Yet

[William33 110]

I recently loaded Mozilla Firefox as my default browser.

I use Zone Labs, Zone Alarm as my firewall.

I am using CA - E Trust Virus, a free add on, for Virus protection.

For some reason, my system is repeatedly crashing, non-stop.. I did a "system restore" today, rolling back one week, which reduced the crashes to only 1 over a period of 14 hours.

All of the crashes were directly related to Firefox. I now wonder why.

Any ideas?

As background, I previously had a hard drive crash, in September 06. To that end, I installed a brand new hard drive, loaded Windows XP and realized unbelievable performance. As time went by, I noted lagging performance issues, I surmise that the Registry was compromised with all of the visited sites.

How can I fix that?

I am thinking about reformatting, and starting over again. Seems to me, that this should be regular exercise, every six months.

Any thoughts on that?

[Dr_LHA 3]

I am thinking about reformatting, and starting over again. Seems to me, that this should be regular exercise, every six months.

Any thoughts on that?

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore

Though seriously - have you tried to install something to check for spyware, like AdAware?

I've never had stability issues on Firefox on XP myself, in fact is about the most stable thing I've used on Windows.

[William33 110]

I am thinking about reformatting, and starting over again. Seems to me, that this should be regular exercise, every six months.

Any thoughts on that?

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore

Though seriously - have you tried to install something to check for spyware, like AdAware?

I've never had stability issues on Firefox on XP myself, in fact is about the most stable thing I've used on Windows.

Indeed I have. Adaware SE personal, is my primary spyware program. The free version.

I am not ready to shift to Mac, yet many others close to me have. I am standing ready to understand why not. Thanks for the information.

Edited March 10, 2007 by William33

[Dan J 277]

Can't really say much without knowing your system. I doubt its firefox specifically thats causing the problem but it might be something that it does or interacts with that has an issue. When you say crash, do you mean blue screen of death? or some other kind of error?

[William33 110]

Dell, laptop, 512 K Ram (upgradeable), 1.6 GHZ processor, 60 GHZ drive, etc.....

The issue is the registry, I believe. Every time you visit a site, and/or download offerings from trusted sites, the problems ensue. Any ideas?

[Dan J 277]

I would suggest that you start by going here: http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/...;l=en&s=dhs and download current drivers for everything if you haven't already.

If you do have an issue with registry corruption, reinstalling windows is probably the only reliable way to fix it. But then the question is how did the registry become corrupt. Is there a memory or hard disk issue? You can use memtest86 (http://www.memtest.org/) run it for a few hours and see if you get any errors. If you do, you likely have a memory or mainboard issue. For hard drive, use scandisk with windows and see if it returns any bad sectors.

What kind of crashes are you getting? If its a blue screen of death, there are ussualy codes associsated with the error that can lead you to a solution or at least the source of the problem. Blue screen errors are also logged and viewable in the event viewer. You can access it via the control panel or by going to run and typing in "eventvwr.msc" without the quotes and clicking ok. Your likely to find the errors in the application or system log.

[William33 110]

Thanks for the information. Yes, I get the blue screen of death. This is the information from the event viewer:

Details

Product: Windows Operating System

ID: 1003

Source: System Error

Version: 5.2

Symbolic Name: ER_KRNLCRASH_LOG

Message: Error code %1, parameter1 %2, parameter2 %3, parameter3 %4, parameter4 %5.

Explanation

A blue screen (Stop error) was reported. The message contains details about the error. A matching event with Event ID 1001 might also appear in the event log. This matching event displays information about the specific error that occurred.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Do you have any conflicts in your device manager?

[William33 110]

Do you have any conflicts in your device manager?

How do I check that?

[Michaela_Hassan 1]

I'm a firefox user too and I never had a problem with it either...knock on wood! Hope you can get your problems worked out.

[Ban Hammer 13,346]

Indeed I have. Adaware SE personal, is my primary spyware program. The free version.

adaware does not detect items that well. i dumped it.

[Dr_LHA 3]

Dell, laptop, 512 K Ram (upgradeable), 1.6 GHZ processor, 60 GHZ drive, etc.....

The issue is the registry, I believe. Every time you visit a site, and/or download offerings from trusted sites, the problems ensue. Any ideas?

Dells usually have a diagnostics package with them that can either be access from a CD or run from the boot screen. Have you run that? Might be a hardware issue.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Do you have any conflicts in your device manager?

How do I check that?

go to control panel (classic view), double click 'system', go to hardware tab, then click 'device manager'.

see if you have any conflicts. there will be a yellow question mark if you do.

[William33 110]

Do you have any conflicts in your device manager?

How do I check that?

go to control panel (classic view), double click 'system', go to hardware tab, then click 'device manager'.

see if you have any conflicts. there will be a yellow question mark if you do.

I had a yellow question mark next to: PCI Modem.

I uninstalled that item. Is that for dial up connections?

[Dan J 277]

Yes it is, but its unlikely to be the direct source of your problem. The blue screen error message would help, but it seems like its not logging the acutal error codes. If you can get acutal error codes you can search for them on support.microsoft.com.