I have a Firefox question for all the computer smart people out there. It might have been better asked on a computer website, but I just like ya'll better. Here goes.

I was using Firefox as my primary web browser on my home computer (1 year old HP running Media Center with all updates.

Firefox recently (when I started it) would bog down, and my hard drive would show continuous activity for like 5 minutes. During this time, internet access would be p a i n f u l l y slow, sometimes non-existant. My internet access is via cable modem through Time Warner Cable, so it is usually quick.

In the end, I got rid of Firefox and went back to Explorer. I don't know what Firefox was doing to my computer, if it was sending my data out to some other server, I don't know. I do know that this doesn't happen with IE.

I did like Firefox better, though, and would reinstall it if I knew what it was doing and how to stop it. The wait was annoying as well.

Any ideas?

I believe the way firefox allocates memory is a bit different. It takes a percentage of the system memory for cache and sometimes the paging
could take some time.

I constantly monitor traffic to/from my network/pc and I dont think
Firefox sends any/lot of personal information out.. (compared to IE)

On the other hand, I've seen Microsoft applications and IE reach out to
Microsoft sites periodically.
(they claim they dont send out any system specific information... but
thats not true)

I am not sure if you had any extensions installed, but sometimes they can slow down or lock you firefox as well.

Sounds like a bad extension. You can start FF in Safe Mode and disable all your extensions, then re-enable them until the problem happens again.

You could try creating a new profile and see if that runs OK. Also try reinstalling (or install the latest version).