Firefox - tell me if this sounds familiar...

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Firfox is acting up again. Its happened before, seemed to resolve itself - not sure how - and yet several months later I'm seeing the same behavior again.

- Can't open it by clicking, need to right click and opt for 'open'
- Every new page offers a new tab
- Every time I click on one of the excess tabs it disappears; I have to be careful if I'm drafting a message as it can easily disappear while I'm cleaning up my screen top.
- The circular scrolling crosshairs show up constantly.
- Actually hitting the 'submit' button or any action key and having it work properly becomes a distinct challenge - so far no triplicate postings, knock on wood.

I might have thought from this behavior that this is a virus but - I've seen it before and its just as readily been passed on by Avast. Also an important thing to note, Windows 7 quite regularly and at least one a session, when I right click on something in either file manager or an icon I'll have Microsoft Explorer stop functioning and reset. I've been told by friends that Mozilla has been known to cause that particular problem - ie. crashing Windows explorer.

So is this just bad programming on the side of Mozilla or is it more likely that I have a virus sitting somewhere that I just haven't found yet?

Firefox doing this? Never heard of it.
Uninstall firefox and see if the problem is still there.. But it sounds more like virus/malware to me

it could be the firefox registry thing (where u change preferences - some of these could be corrupt???)

that makes it sound like the problem is in windows rather than firefox
again that sounds like a windows or exploder problem, I'd suspect that some DLL either got corrupted or infected or a registry entry got mangled

Great. Does windows have any diagnostics that I can run that'll possibly name the file?

if its a corrupted file, it wont be too long till windows moans about it.

Yeah, looks like it has. Something about extended Windows Explorer shell via some auxiliary that microsoft has created. They have a hot fix but they're not recommending it until they have another update. I might have to try it tomorrow anyway, the problem is bad enough that I have about ten Wrongplanet tabs I'm looking at around the top of the page and I had about two hours where I couldn't even submit a post because the 'submit' button did nothing. Seems like links for the most part links work ok, buttons...not so much.

May I suggest Linux? Or OSx86?

Seconding Asp-Z's suggestion. If you have trouble posting with those, you might have a bad net connection or hardware problem.

Thirded for GNU/Linux suggestion, at least on a livecd to test whether the problem is in your software or somewhere else.

You could try switching to Chrome or something else until whatever issue with Firefox gets resolved.

Both times it happened it transferred over to both IE and Chrome, so I have to figure that it was a problem with the Windows explorer retrofits.

You can try ShellExView (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html).

There's a setting in most browser to set it as the default browser. Most browsers implement it so that the value is checked when the browser is started and they will gladly overwrite the system settings without asking you again. So if you don't want IE to be the default browser, not only do you have to set another browser as default, you also have to uncheck the default browser settings in IE.

Then it sounds like a Windows problem if it goes across all your browsers... I can't do much to help you there, unfortunately. I could, however, make a sarcastic comment about the advisability of your purchasing a machine from Apple Inc.