Hey, lately (the past two days) FireFox has been acting really *strange* and just generally loads way too slow. I haven't installed any programs and nothing that I've done, I think, would have warranted this change. I tried to open up IE, but the same thing happened. My computer doesn't seem to lag like this at all doing other tasks, only with internet browsing.

Please help, thanks.

Clear all the caches, internet temp folders, history and run anti-spyware and antivirus programs.

I just cleared my cache; I'm in progress of deleting my temp folder; history was cleared, i ran Ad-Aware(updated) and i don't have an AV

edit: C/windows/temp?

Use this for a virusscan:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

And yeah, clear all your private data in FF and IE. Then also run Disk Cleaup and that should help a bit.

Yeh, boxster, the problem is so bad that http://housecall65.trendmicro.com/ is barely loading for me .. it's almost like it just time's out but the progress "swirl" thing in the upper right of FF still spins ..

please, some more help?

Try opening it in IE, I don't know if their scanner supports other browsers.

The government is watching you.. It's a sign that they planted a bug.

But.. you said IE did the same? Maybe someone is leeching your on your costs?

i will try to see how it is in non-peak hours when i get home today (not there, now). also, i'll unplug everyone else from the router to see if there was a problem.

Autovisie - we don't use WiFi or 802.11b or any other kind of wireless routers in our house, and, i think i would've noticed if there was another wire running out of our home.

Boxster - i'll try it in IE later, but, i downloaded a McAfee 30day trial thing from download.cnet.com and ran that. there was a Trojan infection in my My Documents folder, which i deleted after i couldn't clean it.

also, i will defragment all HDDs. in the event that none of these solutions work, is there anything short of formatting that i can do?

you could format and get rid of all the problems your computer could ever have!

Yeah you could just do a complete reformat. Back up everything to another computer then just reformat that one. That's what I usually do when I have problems, it's just easier a lot of the time and not to mention after a clean install everything runs so smooth.