A big mess!

I have been trying to fix my laptop for the past 2 1/2 days, and am only making things worse.

Firstly, all was working reasonably well 3 days ago. I spent a lot of time on facebook playing farmville using Mozilla Firefox, with my dial up connection. Then I downloaded Mozilla Firefox 6, which ran very slow and as well as greatly slowing IE 9. Both browsers showed alot of white or blank pages.

I decided to uninstall Mozilla Firefox 6, then reinstall it. I uninstalled it, but was unable to download it again. So I reloaded an older version of mozilla 3.6, I had on my computer. I tried to download Firefox 6 again but keep getting a message "....... could not be saved, because the source file could not be read."

IE9 was still not working very well either.

Then I used system restore, to reset to three days ago. But firefox 6 would not work.

I have also cleaned my browsers cache, cleaned my registry, and run checkdisk.

Now I have firefox 3.6, which I can't update, runs really slow (it took about 20mins to open my hotmail), and I can't play farmville with it.

Also now IE9 also runs really slow, I can update, can't play farmville or download adobe flash player or firefox.

I thought the best way forward would be to find a way to download firefox 6 because although slow, it did eventually let me play farmville (which I'm addicted to).

Please please help me.

Are you using disk cleanup ? Did you defragment ?

Yes, tried both. Still have long download times, with lots of white/blank screens.

Or restore your Windows to 3 days ago when things were going well.

Thanks for all the advice.

1. I ran sfc /scannow in an elevated command prompt (Run as Administrator), and there were no problems detected.

2. I did restore windows to 3 days ago, but the Mozilla Firefox was disabled, hence I reloaded the old 3.6 version I had on my hard drive.

3. I have tried unsucessfully to download firefox 6, 5.1, 5 and 3.6.2. I get the same message....."could not be saved, because the source file could not be read".

4. I also try flushed the DNS cache from an elevated command with copy/paste ipconfig /flushdns, and there was no noticeable difference.

Export your Firefox favorites to the desktop.

Uninstall Firefox in Control Panel.

Download Firefox to the desktop, not to another partition or drive on the computer. The error sometimes happens when installer is downloaded to an unpermissioned drive.

Rightclick Firefox .exe to Run as Admin.

Hope it helps.

Hi, I just exported my firefox bookmarks to the desktop. But when I tried to uninstall firefox 3.6 I got an error message that said "Firefox must be closed to proceed with the uninstall. Please close firefox to continue."

All firefox windows were closed. I also checked on task manager, but no firefox windows were open.