Which ad-blocking software do you have enabled? The google forums likely require the connection to google-analytics to complete before the forum becomes active, so blocking this connection is breaking the site.

The possibilities that could cause this are:

1. AdBlock Plus, which you have enabled
2. A "/etc/hosts" file is blocking google analytics. See this article and remove any google analytics lines in the file.
3. A firewall is blocking the site. See Configure firewalls so that Firefox can access the Internet for troubleshooting steps.

google-analytics is crap. Dump it or I go back to Explorer.

The wiki entry is double dutch to me, need something in non techie language. The firewall I use is not listed (Outpost). I get round it by hitting the stop key on some sites, but blogging is impossible.

I can not blog....please fix this!

Okay, I'm still getting some weird stuff occurring, but I found the Firefox addon NoScript helps LOADS. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722/ - it stops google-analytics from running the script that causes it to hang. You have to fiddle with the options a bit too to get some sites to work, although you can either "temporarily" allow the scripts, or permanently and tweak various settings. Haven't fully explored it yet, but it's stopped that annoying redirect, it seems to be running much quicker AND I can blog, at long last. :-)