First of all read the article (You will lose some information )

• Reset Firefox preferences to troubleshoot and fix problems

You may wish to close as many tabs as possible, and bookmark any open ones, and the homesites of any extensions you have.

Try the reset. An ordinary uninstall and reinstall of Firefox rarely fixes anything. Please post back after the reset to say how you got on.

Your Norton toolbars as you have noted should be compatible if you update them.Not sure how useful they actually are likely to be, but the security components of Norton will continue to work regardless of the toolbars.

Many thanks for your reply John99 - I've just tried the reset and deleting the prefs.js file, twice - no luck.

After each reset and file deletion I tried reinstalling an addon - the first time I installed All-in-One Sidebar and the second time I installed Tab Mix Plus. In each instance, they installed fine but when I clicked on "Options" the browser froze.

Hello elenisophia, any luck if you Turn off hardware acceleration ?

also for the Norton toolbar, see : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/969109

thank you

After the reset did you try using Firefox before adding the extensions back ?

With no extensions does about:addons {or keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+A) work ok ? (It will only have plugins etc todisplay) but can you see the addons page and click on options and buttons without hanging ?

Next install a couple of Firefox extensions and I would suggest you try these two, they are both written to help with Firefox problems

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/troubleshooter/
  That will be added as you submit your first question and opt to add troubleshooting information, but the reset will have removed it.
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/places-maintenance
  That produces a simple status report on your bookmarks database, and can help fix it.

I chose those two because

• they are relatively simple and trouble free extensions
• written by Firefox developers,
• I doubt they will have been on your machine before the problem, so are unlikely to cause the problem . If you reinstall what reset removes you may just cause the problem again

Hi guys,

Thanks again for your suggestions.

I reset Firefox again and installed the two addons recommended by John99. I was able to access the "Options" button without the browser hanging.

I then tried to install some of my chosen addons in addition to those two recommended, to try and find the cause of the problem, and found that All-In-One Sidebar, Tab Mix Plus, and Forecastfox all caused the browser to hang when I clicked on "Options". Adblock Plus caused no issues. (I reset Firefox for each test, first installing the two recommended addons and then installing one of the above.)

After these tests, I reset Firefox again and unchecked the "Use hardware acceleration when available" option as recommended by ideato. I then installed the two recommended addons and tried the "Options" buttons for each of those. Strangely, the Places Maintenance addon options now caused the browser to freeze. Meanwhile, the All-In-One Sidebar options now worked fine.

My Norton toolbars are now gone. I have had Norton support trying to fix those over the last week anyway as they were appearing as disabled and supposedly should have been working. They have tried uninstalling and reinstalling Norton countless times and are telling me to refer the issue to Microsoft.

Also, before doing all of this, I deleted the Adobe dll file to remove the extension as it was still listed as being vulnerable and would not update despite confirmations the update had occurred.

If you have any other suggestions please let me know. I do enjoy those addons and would love to be able to use them again if there is any way to get it happening, but I understand it might be too difficult to diagnose remotely.

Thanks for your help.

This seems rather odd. Obviously if you set up Firefox in a particular way it should behave the same way each time it is set up that way. If it does not that probably suggests that some external factor is influencing things.

Norton has apparently already suggested investigating your Windows OS.

I would also suggest you check the Memory as that could possible produce odd and intermittent results if it has some faults. There are testing utilites that may be rum overnight. Often the software is OS independent.

• see for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memtest

I am having the same problem after updating to latest version 23.0.1 Before I never had this kind of problem. Now I am thinking that I might not be able to use to Firefox due to this issue and I start to use crome as can't work like this.

Please let us know what to do.

Hi litonbd, to see whether this is caused by a compatibility issue with one of your add-ons, or other common issues, could you try Firefox's Safe Mode? That's a standard diagnostic tool to bypass interference by extensions (and some custom settings). More info: Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode.

You can restart Firefox in Safe Mode using

Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled

In the dialog, click "Start in Safe Mode" (not Reset)

Any difference?