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First Flashplayer in FireFox after boot Casuses total Freeze except excessive HD action for 5 seconds

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Mostly anytime I boot up vista and using firefox to load the first page of interest that has any flashplayer on that page, the computet freezes.

My tailed mouse (on the screen) will have several pointers shown as the mouse action across the screen is show and then abruptly stop leaving 4-5 mouse pointers spread across the screen.

When I say freeze, I mean keyboard does not work, no option to see taskmanager, no further mouse movement possible, no keys work.

Next, nothing happens except total HD action for several (5) seconds and then after that everything is ok.

I caught the time that this happened (looking at screen clock) and went back with a Explorer search for the day/time to find any files that had beenn created or modified during that time - Nothing changed - so the other question is how come nothing changed when my HD was going balistic (green light solid)?

Since then I have uninstalled FP within FF and removed adobe from my computer.

Thanks for your interest

Mostly anytime I boot up vista and using firefox to load the first page of interest that has any flashplayer on that page, the computet freezes. My tailed mouse (on the screen) will have several pointers shown as the mouse action across the screen is show and then abruptly stop leaving 4-5 mouse pointers spread across the screen. When I say freeze, I mean keyboard does not work, no option to see taskmanager, no further mouse movement possible, no keys work. Next, nothing happens except total HD action for several (5) seconds and then after that everything is ok. I caught the time that this happened (looking at screen clock) and went back with a Explorer search for the day/time to find any files that had beenn created or modified during that time - Nothing changed - so the other question is how come nothing changed when my HD was going balistic (green light solid)? Since then I have uninstalled FP within FF and removed adobe from my computer. Thanks for your interest

Chosen solution

Upgrade to Firefox (26)

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All Replies (6)

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Chosen Solution

Upgrade to Firefox (26)

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The Flash Player plugin does need to initialize for its first run, but I'm not sure why that would be so disk intensive in your case.

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It is possible that your security software (firewall, anti-virus) blocks or restricts Firefox or the plugin-container process without informing you, possibly after detecting changes (update) to the Firefox program.

Remove all rules for Firefox and the plugin-container from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full unrestricted access to internet for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.

See:


Boot the computer in Windows Safe Mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

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Now using Firefox 26 - same problem. Have removed and re-installed all the adobe products and that solves the problem and re-installing flash brings the problem back. Further, Looking at that precise time of the freeze and searching for any change in files (anywhere in the computer) at or during that time, shows No changes.

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First run - sounds like my symptoms.

But then when I Look at that precise time of the freeze and searching for any change in files (anywhere in the computer) at or during that time, shows No changes.

So what does this first run do?

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On first access to Flash, the plugin will launch some new processes outside of Firefox's plugin-container.exe. This is part of the protected mode feature to isolate evil Flash content better from your system. I can see why this might trip some firewall issues, but I'm not sure whether it's relevant to disk access.

You could try disabling protected mode, as it is known to be buggy, and see whether that helps. See: