LandzDown Forum

Just gained another several dozen gray hairs.

I was just over two hours on the Net after downloading the last Firefox update last night (9.0.1?) when I noticed my Desktop starting to go dark around any icon my cursor managed to brush.  Within seconds part of my taskbar's icons had disappeared and I was unable to get Start to activate.  Wallpaper disappeared. Tried to restart via the power button....got the same useless screen.  Thank god that the Troubleshooting window popped up and I was able to have the system back up to the latest restore point.

My Firefox refused to show more than a Crash Report window so I went back to my old 8.01 version exe file and re-installed over the 9 version.  It's been working okay.  Downloaded the lost MSE updates, but when I ran a scan it showed the old version.  Used the taskbar to re-Update that and got the newest virus scan...Full Scan was okay.
Noticed that Malwarebytes was still showing the original dates AND the update button was still grayed out despite their website listing newer dates.  Re-downloaded fresh version and installed latest definitions>Full Scan>no infections.

Scotty has not barked.

Remembered what you said about Adobe causing issues and disabled all their plug ins in Firefox.  Been four hours online now and no hint of trouble as yet.

Question:  is this the sort if 'issue' you spoke of having with Adobe Reader?  I'm afraid to try re-downloading and installing Firefox 9.01 again in case that was what caused the problem.  (Or it could have been MS optional updates? *sigh*)  Can't find anybody complaining about Firefox 9 crashing since yesterday.

Control Panel>System and Security>Windows Updates>Change Settings:

Important Updates:  install automatically automatically at 3:00AM
(hmmm...desktop did start to disintegrate a little after 3am.)

I've just changed that setting to "Let me chose to download and install."  Do not want another heart attack.  Funny thing....I remember just yesterday there was an Important update which I had to click on to download and install.

Is the Control Panel path to updates different from the program down on the taskbar Microsoft Security Essentials?  I thought they were just different paths to the same thing, but just now it had me install updates even though the Control Panel path to Windows Updates did not.

Now I am thoroughly confused!  Do I need to check both Control Panel> Windows Updates and Taskbbar MSE Updates both? 

So no known issues with Firefox version 9?  (Argh...lost the downloaded exe for that.  Another 3 hours tonight.. 

Interesting...sibling just chimed in that while he does have some Firefox issues with freezing (so have I if I have more than one graphics site running), his did not crash.  Maybe it was an update and Firefox 9 combined that done the dirty deed.

Phone is ringing off the hook during day; I start work early and like to do most of my surfing just before leaving for it plus with dial up it's now nigh impossible to get some sites even in the wee hours let alone during peak business times, so, yeah, on at 3am.  I usually don't do Sleep unless I think I can be on within four hours.  Later than that and I just turn the computer off.

Don't think it was the restart...when I first got this computer there was something like 38 Important updates to download.  I usually managed at least 4 before my dial-up would time out.  Now the worst I had was four (usually no more than a few MB at a time as I'm checking at least once a day).
Firefox v9 was finished with being installed at least two hours previously and had been running smoothly until about 3:15 when I started noticing little things happening with my status window breaking up...then the icons started acting weird....by 3:30 it was unusable.

I had the Connection Status window open and Firefox had four tabs up with all but one static text sites and one Google Search just completed.  Hard to think the CPU would have overloaded from any of that.

Sibling has related that his last batch of updates (downloads every 3-5 days) gave him trouble in that a couple did not install and he had to download them again.

I'll try downloading Firefox v9 again this weekend and see what happens.  Might have been corrupted just enough to have caused a perfect storm with Windows Updates installing.