I doubt it's a Desk-Top issue. The problem only happens when Firefox is executed and has NEVER happened before FF 106.0.2. It doesn't happen with any other program.

I have FF106.0.5 and have no issues or memory leaks or explorer freezes when using explorer with Firefox running. And this is on Window 10x64 pro. So unless there something kinda install issue corruption you going to have to take it to a computer shop to see what is happening. Also Windows 7 support has long been gone and that could also play a part in the compatibility as well.

FWIW, I tried aj8mh-radio's solution of going back to the ESR release, 102.4.0esr, two weeks ago. I totally purged the 106 release, including the Mozilla local and roaming directories, and installed the 102esr version. Works great - haven't seen a single Windows desktop hang since then.

 I guess I can't upgrade Firefox anymore...

UPDATE: 106.0.2 The last time my desktop and taskbar froze was on 11/14/22. I haven't changed anything. I had updated FF to 106.0.5 / 64bit on Windows 8.1. I don't know what happened (maybe an auto update somewhere on my pc) but I haven't had problems opening Firefox browser yesterday or today.

I wish I knew where to look but I did find in Windows Reliabilty History that Malwarebytes and Adobe Acrobat did updates around the time this started.

Malwarebytes did an update in the last couple of days so maybe that's it but I don't really know.

There is a FF update for 107 but I think I'll wait a while before installing that one to see if everything continues to work okay.

The problem came back a couple days later. I updated to 107.0 but Firefox still caused desktop and taskbar to freeze every time I open it. If no one here is going to help figure this out, I'm going to uninstall Firefox.