Strange Firefox hang

I get strange problems with Firefox suddenly hanging all of windows and when it occurs I can't access the Task manager even to stop it. Sometimes it turns into a black screen with the error msg about Ctrl+Alt+Del, other times I'm able to access it, but most of the time when it happens it turns out I'll have to do a reboot.

It's a very strange error because it seems to happen at different times, not when I do a particular thing. I have tried to think and locate the problem but there's no indication what it may be...

Any tips comes appreciated.

I'm not sure the problem is caused by FF, but it clearly manifests in FF...
The whole window turns gray (when I click after the error has started) and I get that hourglass/circle thing running constantly.

I checked out the application error log and even the other logs but I couldn't find anything particularly interesting. Application error log didn't even have errors.

It's soooo strange, and I don't think the error is caused by any add-ons either.

I just don't know... I think I've tried to reinstall FF earlier too without resolving the issue.

Is this just happening on a particular website? Can you duplicate the error with a different browser?

tylerD said:

I'm not sure the problem is caused by FF, but it clearly manifests in FF...
The whole window turns gray (when I click after the error has started) and I get that hourglass/circle thing running constantly.

I checked out the application error log and even the other logs but I couldn't find anything particularly interesting. Application error log didn't even have errors.

It's soooo strange, and I don't think the error is caused by any add-ons either.

I just don't know... I think I've tried to reinstall FF earlier too without resolving the issue.

Re-installation of Firefox rarely fixes any problems, as the most often reside in the Firefox profile, not in the program.

Standard diagnostic - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

My guess is a problem in your firewall/AV software. I had something similar when I installed a network monitor program (to replace the missing twinkly system tray one as in XP) and my firewall didn't like something about it and gave me 3 options to choose from. I obviously chose the wrong one because Firefox went bonkers every few tens of minutes when browsing and yet there was little pattern on the surface as to what triggered it. The fix was to restore defaults in the firewall and let it 'learn' the network app again when I ran it.