I wonder if any comp experts out there can help me with this one.

I'm running with Vista, also have the basic free zone alarm firewall, latest AVG freeware, and also have spybot search and destroy installed. To browse the web I use that latest firefox.

My problem is that for the last week or so web pages (seemingly at random) just get stopped. It won;t let me access any other websites using refresh or by opening a different web site. When I close all the windows and open up firefox again it says that another instance of firefox is running and I should close this first. So I've opened up task manager and selected the firefox application and clicked close process. Nothing happens. I have been performing a forced shut down on the comp which I don;t really want to keep on having to do.

My internet connection say that it is open and connected and I have set up zone alarm to allow firefox. Have to admit that I am stumped and getting a little frustrated.

Hope someone out there can advise.

Triskele

I have seen this problem on another site, the only difference seems to be that in the other case, only Yahoo is affected, once the problem has been encountered it also affects Internet Explorer.

Since he also has AVG plus Zone Alarm on Vista, and his other PC's running on XP don't have any problems, I and suspect of the combination of AVG plus ZA on Vista.

He has decided to run with IE instead of FF for now. But it might be worth disabling both ZA and AVG (for a short period only) and see if things are OK. You could also try replacing AVG with Avast. It would be OK to run for a while without ZA, use the Vista firewall instead.

This is going to be trial and error .......

I also have IE on my machine and I swapped over to that and like you said it also affected it. Think I'll try what you said, disable zonealarm and run for a bit to see if I encounter any problems and then try the same but with AVG disabled to see if we can work out where the problem is coming from.

Cheers

Triskele

Could this be perhaps a Flash Player problem ?:|

Or even Java???

(Like your train of thought Anne, worth investigating.)

Okay an update of what I've tried so far :-)

First off I disabled zonealarm, switched on vista's firewall and left avg running. Managedto surf for about 10 minutes before the problem kicked in again. Forced reboot and tried the following.

Re-enabled zonealarm, switched off vista's firewall and uninstalled avg. So far (about 8 hours or so of web use) no re-occurence of the problem. Obviously this leaves me without avg's protection. I am thinking about re-installing it but going down the custom re0install route to see if that will work out.

All the best and thanks for the help,

Triskele.

Try installing Avast instead of AVG.