Hello Gary.

You may be having a problem with some Firefox add-on that is hindering your Firefox's normal behavior. Have you tried disabling all add-ons (just to check), to see if Firefox goes back to normal?

Whenever you have a problem with Firefox, whatever it is, you should make sure it's not coming from one of your installed add-ons, be it an extension, a theme or a plugin. To do that easily and cleanly, run Firefox in safe mode and select Disable all add-ons. If the problem disappears, you know it's from an add-on. Disable them all in normal mode, and enable them one at a time until you find the source of the problem. See this article for information about troubleshooting extensions and theme. You can troubleshoot plugins the same way.

If you want support for one of your add-ons, you'll need to contact its author.

Thanks for the info, I did disable the add-ons and it did not cure the problem. Gary

Have you tried reinstalling Firefox?

If that doesn't help, try creating a new (temporarily only, don't worry) Firefox profile ([http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles|managing profiles) to see if the issue is persistent across different profiles.

This issue can be caused by a problem with the file c:\windows\system32\dwmapi.dll The file dwmapi.dll is a Vista file and should not be present in Windows XP.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969155 - On a Windows XP-based computer with Family Safety installed, you receive an error message: “The procedure entry point IsThreadDesktopComposited could not be located in the dynamic link library USER32.dll”

I selected this option of deleting the file after disabling extensions and plug ins had no effect. Normal start up is now "uneventful" . I have been living with this problem for a while and finally decided that enough is enough, although I do not normally play with system files.

Did the trick! Thank you very much, now I don't have to wait 2 minutes for my browser to start! Easy fix too! Thanks again!