Waited a whole day before posting this. So far Firefox has not been a problem in the last 24 hours; neither has IE7 but I've only used that on a limited basis. As I'm stating in my post, I want to give each 3-4 days. My immunization settings in Spybot for Firefox are still for cookies only; if everything works out for Firefox I'll have to change that back to normal just to see if indeed that makes a difference as stated in the Spybot link in MozillaZine and also to determine just which one, Zonelab or Spybot is the culprit.
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Thought I'd give y'all an update on my problem. As I said, this has been really frustrating to say the least. Yesterday I went through all settings I changed/played with based on information and tutorials from this group and I found that in TCP GLOBAL PARAMETERS the first three items were set to DISABLED; how that happened, I have no clue. Just like a couple of internet registry settings which I know I changed a while back but discovered to be back at default after installing IE8. In any case, I thought I had me something there and set those first 3 items in TCP GLOBAL PREFERENCES back to enabled, enabled and normal and began browsing both in Firefox and IE7; no go, same problem occurred again.
Then I started googling and I couldn't believe it, I found a post that could have been written by me!
Internet Browser Problems - microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general | Google Groups
As I already had done Avast and Spybot scans on numerous occasions and wanted to avoid for now doing a HIJACKTHIS, I scanned other pages in that thread and stumbled on MozillaZine regarding this problem.
Firefox hangs - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
The item of particular interest to me was HANG AT EXIT and the references in it to SPYBOT, AVAST and ZONE LAB. To make a long story short, what I did was disable all immunization for Firefox except cookies, uninstall Zonelab Free Firewall and install Comodo after reading the review on it in .pcmag. I will probably undo that change in Spybot just to have one change at a time but for now since last night I have not had a single instance of Firefox "doing its thing". While I'm aware that all this has only to do with Firefox and I have a similar problem with IE7, I do hope this "cure" will last long enough (3-4 days) so I can try it on IE7.
BTW, I really AM impressed with Comodo, seems to run smoother and start faster; if anyone has any comments to the contrary, I'd like to hear them.
Perhaps I'm again getting ahead of myself for posting this before my "test period" expires" but I think there might be others with the same problem and interested in reading the MozillaZine article.
In conclusion, I also turned UAC back on which was set to off ever since I got this rig. Don't think that would affect anything but somehow, now, it's not such a big deal anymore to have the popups even when I'm signed in as an administrator; and the perhaps added protection might be worth it.
