I did restart in safe mode, myself. I cleared all the cookies and the browsing history, I took out all the bookmarks (after printing them out) and that didn't help. I've had Windows 7 for about 6 months, now. There weren't any problems at all until just recently. It started with Firefox lagging, hanging and becoming just generally unresponsive. Then, even after switching to other browsers, which are driving me insane, windows explorer began restarting constantly. There was no stopping it. I let the compy run a diagnostic on the memory...no probs. I ran a few deep virus scans...no probs. I restarted in safe mode, still had the prob. When I removed all the start up programs, save for the essentials, everything worked great. This meant it's a 3rd party problem...but figuring out which one was a pain. At a person's suggestion, I deleted everything that had to do with Firefox and my problem completely resolved. Problem is...I want Firefox BACK!!! I'm going crazy with these other, inadequate browsers. My general point here is, everything was working great until a few weeks ago...the only difference I can think of is updates! If anyone else had any ideas, please, let me know. I started a thread on this and a couple of people have reported the same problem, but there aren't any solutions or ideas as of yet.

This was driving me to use another computer not suffering the same hangups. So when bored I'd read posts and play with possible solutions.

I ended up going to Firefox, opening Tools -- Addons -- Extensions and disabling groups of Extensions for a test.

What worked for me was disabling all the older version Java Consoles except the latest one I had loaded which was 6.0.22.

Miracles happen, so far 2 days of speedy Firefox again. Sometimes it's just a crap shoot and you get lucky. Of course no guarantee it'll work for you too, there never is, but it was an easy enough thing to try.

Good Luck!