Browser Crashes during video playback

I'm having trouble with streaming videos. No matter what browser I am using, Firefox 3.6.3 or IE 8 the browser will freeze up and become unresponsive. No matter what plugin is being used, still the same problem. I've reinstalled flash about three times, silverlight twice, and Firefox once. I thought it was a flash problem initially because I'd heard Firefox and Flash often have problems, but I tried to stream a movie from Netflix which uses Silverlight and the problem keeps happening. Because of the occurance across different programs/plugins, I'm assuming its an OS issue. Anyone seen anything like this or have any ideas? Thanks.

I have had this problem of videos crashing my browser for weeks. It started in IE9, so I got Firefox, then that crashed too, so I got Chrome, and that crashed too. I also noticed that if I downloaded Flash videos, and played them locally, they crashed the viewer too. The Adobe forums lead me to believe that maybe I needed to update my video driver, so I did that; but videos still crashed whatever ran them. I noticed that sometimes my sound would stop working before the video crashed, and sometimes I heard loud clicks while the video played, and I couldn’t launch the soundcard interface; so I wondered if the sound card was the problem. Today I re-installed my sound card driver, and the problem went away! These problems are not all straightforward, Windows machines can be difficult to trouble shoot, and not a every problem has an readily apparent cause.