Actually, it appears you have done this already. Never mind!

What is the Hotspot Shield Extension for? A user in another thread said he had a lot of Youtube problems from that extension (but he didn't want to give it up).

Instead of disabling plugins, could you try disabling that extension? You can do that on the Add-ons page. Either:

• Ctrl+Shift+a
• orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Extensions.

If a link appear above the extension to restart Firefox, go ahead and click that. If you are in a regular (non-private session), Firefox should automatically restore your open windows and tabs.

Does that improve things?

One of the feature of Safe Mode is that it disables Firefox's use of hardware acceleration for graphics. This works around incompatibilities with certain graphics driver software.

orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Options > Advanced

On the "General" mini-tab, uncheck the box for "Use hardware acceleration when available"

This takes effect after you exit and restart Firefox.

Please try any the below:

• Disable the Firefox hardware acceleration ^{(More Details)}
• Disable the Flashplayer acceleration ^{(More Details)}

Please report back soon.

Thanks very much for your help. Well - I deleted Hotspot Shield to no avail. Now no plugins or extensions are enabled. Killing the hardware accelerator DID work! But why? It has never had this problem before today. Was there an update that would have made that sensitive? I am not sure I like it that the accelerator is disabled.

As the Firefox developers enable different features to use hardware acceleration, new problems may arise even if Firefox was previously stable with the same graphics drivers. And on the other hand, graphics driver updates may have been bundled in with the recent round of Windows updates, or updates from your system manufacturer. It's apparently a complicated problem making these things work together; some user have it way worse: frequent blue screen crashes...

Hardware acceleration offloads graphics processing from your main system CPU onto the graphics card. If you use a lot of 3D in Firefox, you probably will notice a difference, but for regular 2D graphics and media, not so much.

Thanks for the help! I really appreciate it jscher. Also thanks computer whiz

Happy holidays!

No problem.
I'm just glad to help you.

Thank you using the Mozilla support forum.
Happy holidays to you as well.