Firefox 3.5.6 causes entire computer to freeze
- by Anthony Aziz
Here's the situation:
Environment:
Just installed a fresh copy of Win7 Pro 32-bit to NTFS partition on 750GB SATA drive
Hardware:
E8400 3GHz
ASUS P5QL Pro
4GB DDR2 1066 RAM
EVGA 9800 GTX+
Plenty of cooling, no problems with hardware before
Data is stored on a separate partition, including My Documents
No security software is yet installed
No extensions installed yet
Problem:
While using Firefox, sometimes the entire computer will freeze/hang. I get no mouse or keyboard input, can't CTRL+ALT+DEL, no "not responding" indication, just a static image on my display. My drivers are all up to date as far as I'm aware (I just installed this copy of Windows last week). I first noticed this when trying to install Xmarks. I went to the Xmarks site and tried to install and it would freeze. I managed to get it installed (Safe mode and the Mozilla addon site worked), but when I go to configure it (log in, etc), the computer freezes.
I don't think it's a matter of usage time or memory issues, because while testing, I browsed wallpaper galleries for about 30 minutes, sometimes as many as 12-15 tabs open at a time, without issue. Sometimes I won't even try to install Xmarks at it will hang. I can install (some) other extensions, the only one I've tried is download status bar (which works).
What I've done to try to fix:
Restarted (duh)
Windows safe mode
Completely remove Firefox and install it to a new directory, according to Mozilla's KB (I haven't tried the profile manager, though I assume this does the same thing, except perhaps more thoroughly)
Some BIOS changes, including Power options, disabling oveclocking (it was a modest overclock on the CPU, which has run Win7 beta and RC for almost a year now)
Memtest
Used another Windows user profile, same tragic results
I'm STUCK now, with no idea what to do. I'm using Chrome as my main browser at the moment, but that's not something I want to be stuck with. I like Firefox and want to use it. I'm going to try creating a new profile first.
One thing I did notice: I started leaving task manager and performance monitor open when anticipating (but dreading) a freeze. firefox.exe had low CPU and low memory, but it looked like overall disk usage was seeing some spikes on the small graph Performance Monitor gives you. I saw on one blog post a fellow using XP moved his Local Settings directory from a separate drive to his main drive, and that solved it, but I don't think my AppData directory is on my D: drive, and that's on the same physical device anyways. Still, something that might be worth trying.
I'd extremely appreciate any help. Thanks very much. I really don't want to reinstall Windows from scratch again :(
Anthony Aziz
