I did switch shockwave to 'ask to activate' and it seems to have helped as in I'm not getting a debug/plugin error, but every page I go to is visibly lagging. Any other options or input would be appreciated.

You are one of many users with the same problem. Contact Adobe support.

Ok, I can do that, have they resolved this for others?

Scroll down.

OK. So, I went to the adobe site and I see 345345 people have the same issue. The advice was to look at your operating system, uninstall firefox, and reinstall the 64x. I did that, however it asks me to update firefox and upon trying to, it says it's installed and will restart but then it removes firefox from my computer completely. This is the only way for me to update while using awful vista until I upgrade, and I never had an issue until I took the adobe forum advice and uninstalled my firefox then reinstalled, so now the only way for me to use firefox is to use the version that is not up to date. Can anyone help me figure out how to apply the update to Firefox and have it work? By trying to fix my shockware issue, I now have another one. :(

I guess we have to wait for Adobe to fix this.

I'm not sure it's because of adobe that firefox won't finish installing the last update, and just removes it instead, that sounds like a firefox issue.