[golfista]

It appears the conflict is with Zone Alarm, sometimes it happens quickly and at other times the browser runs for a while. All my testing was with Firefox as that one seems to stop loading more quickly than IE7. In Safe Mode with Networking I ran for almost an hour with nothing added, then I opened Zone Alarm and after 5 minutes the browser stopped loading. I immediately shut down Zone Alarm and the pages started loading again. So then I opened Spy Bot and Avast without problems. After about 20 minutes I opened Zone Alarm again and this time the Browser worked for 1 hour and 40 minutes before loading stopped. Again I immediately shut down Zone Alarm and loading continued.

After rebooting into normal mode with everything running I opened Firefox and it worked fine for over 2 hours. When the pages stopped loading I shut down Zone Alarm, and this time the pages did not start loading again until I closed and the reopened the browser. After the pages were reloaded, it hardly ran a minute until loading stopped and I immediately shutdown Zone Alarm and loading resumed. It seems that Zone Alarm has to be shut off quickly or the loading will not resume without closing and reopening the browser. And if it is a long period of time the browser will not reopen.

At that point IE7 will open with Zone Alarm running and at times run for several hours before the loading stops.

I looked at some of the fixes on the Zone Alarm site but most of that was pretty basic stuff that I have already tried. I am open to suggestions.

[tomdkat]

Go into the "Program Control" section of ZoneAlarm and remove EVERY entry for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Then reboot your system normally. Then when it has booted again, go back to the ZoneAlarm settings and make sure there are no entries for Firefox or Internet Explorer listed.

Then, make sure you have the latest version of ZA installed.

Once you've done all that, fire up Firefox and ZA should prompt you to allow or deny access. Make sure "Remember this setting" is checked and see what happens. Do the same for IE.

Report back what happens.

Peace...

[golfista]

I followed your instructions and Firefox ran for 29 minutes and then it stopped loading. I shutdown Zone Alarm and no results so I closed Firefox and it would not reopen. This is the message that came up on the desktop "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system".

So I opened IE7 and it would not load. I had to restart to get back online.

[tomdkat]

Did ZA prompt you to allow Firefox to access the Internet at all?

Peace...

[golfista]

Yes. Both Firefox and IE.

[tomdkat]

Ok, then something must be tweaked with your ZA installation. Are you using a paid version or the free version? Have you confirmed you're using the latest version? You can do this by going to the "Product Info" tab (I believe) and clicking "Check for Update" or "Update" (there will be a button you can press).

If you're using the free version, maybe you should uninstall it and switch to another one like Comodo's free firewall.

Peace...

[golfista]

I was using the free version of Zone Alarm, but I uninstalled it and installed the Comodo firewall. I have had Firefox running now for 2 and 1/2 hours with no problems. I will give it some more time and if it continues to work I will mark this solved. Thank you so much for your help.

[golfista]

Internet browsing is once again fun and the pages seem to load faster now with the Comodo Internet Security in place of Zone Alarm and Avast. Most of my browsing is with Firefox, but I have found a couple of sites that wouldn't open so I downloaded IE 8 for that and it is working good with Comodo as well.

Thanks to everyone for their input and thank you tomdkat for hanging in and for pointing me to Comodo.

[tomdkat]

Which sites wouldn't open for you in Firefox?

Peace...

[golfista]

One is the National Weather Service radar image from Puerto Rico. which on long range almost reaches Santo Domingo. http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/radar...01111&loop=yes

Another was a local charity group that brought down a construction team last February to work on a construction project at our orphanage sight. http://carpentersforchrist.org

Both sites actually caused Firefox to stop responding, but I only had to shut down the browser and open it back up to clear it.

[tomdkat]

Both sites seem to use Java applets so the issue is most likely Java related. Do you have the latest JRE from Sun installed?

Peace...

[tomdkat]

I just installed the test 64-bit JRE plugin from Sun (I'm using Firefox on Linux) and both sites are loading just fine, no Firefox crashes.

Make sure you have the latest JRE plugin installed.

Peace...

[golfista]

I updated the java and both sites opened. Thank you again.

[tomdkat]

Great!

Peace...