Firefox Hanging up system

[scotman]

Hi All

Recently I have noticed that about once or so every login session my Firefox browser hangs up my system. The cause of this appears to be a program called 'plugin-container.exe' that is taking all the CPU. The only way I can get out of this is to use Task Manager to close Firefox down and restart.
This has been happening on and off for the last 2-3 weeks.
What is causing this and how do I fix it?

I am running XP home + SP3. My system has 1GB of RAM. This is the max my M/B can use.
Everything else is working OK.

thanks

[bibblebub]

Other people have problems with it and this http://www.technogadg...ontainer-exe-process/ describes how to stop it provided you are happy with editing about:config - I don't have a problem and so haven't tried this to know if it works.

[scotman]

Thanks for that. I will look into it.

[Buenchico]

Don't close Firefox. Simply choose 'end process' for plugin-container.exe. Don't worry about the warning regarding the possible dire consequences of closing processes; it won't do any harm. (You'll probably see a message telling you that Adobe Flash Player has crashed. Simply click the 'page reload' button to restore everything to normal).

Plugin-container.exe is actually there to prevent Firefox fromcrashing. It separates the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins from the main browser, so that if one of the plugin applications crashes, Firefox doesn't. As you've found, it can occasionally cause problems of its own (by hogging the CPU) but it's not a major cause for concern. (Hopefully the problem will be fixed for good when a new edition of Firefox is released).

Chris

[scotman]

Thanks Chris