Firefox crashing computer after malware infection?
Firefox is my primary browser, but I use Chome for playing flash games so I can have the windows side by side. Earlier on my Chome I got a typical virus popup, the kind that hijacks your tab and pretends to be Microsoft asking for your credit card. I closed out of it and closed Chome entirely to be safe and ran a virus check with McAffee. When it found a few threats, it tried to open a tab of them in Firefox, which froze the computer. After resetting and updating windows, Firefox still won't start. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling but it didn't seem to help at all. I try to open it now and it gives me the window asking if i want to start in safe mode or refresh firefox, but THAT window crashes and promptly freezes the entire computer. Everything else works fine, Chrome, games, music, internet is connected, but attempting to open Firefox freezes it. Are there any fixes to this? I can't use my virus scanner to remove the virus without Firefox so I am stuck here.
All Replies (3)
Do a malware check with several malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware. All these programs have free versions.
Make sure you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.
- Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - AdwCleaner:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Removal-Tools/AdwCleaner.shtml - SuperAntispyware:
http://www.superantispyware.com/ - Microsoft Safety Scanner:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx - Windows Defender:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/using-defender - Spybot Search & Destroy:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html - Kasperky Free Security Scan:
http://www.kaspersky.com/security-scan
You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.
- Anti-rootkit utility TDSSKiller:
http://support.kaspersky.com/5350?el=88446
See also:
- "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked
Just used all of these. Scanned for more than a day, removed whatever threats they came up with, and did a clean reinstall after they were all done. Some of them refused to removed threats unless I paid them, which I did not pay. Still having the issue, Firefox still freezes the entire computer. I set my default browser to Chrome and that seemed to help speed things up but trying to open firefox still freezes it. Could it be an issue with Firefox being my default browser? Is this still actually malware that's causing the issue?
Another update: I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox to my D: drive to see if that helped, but it seems nothing thus far has worked. Still crashing entire computer and forcing me to hard boot.