[Wayne Luke]

If you are using Firefox 3, make sure that you are using the latest Adobe Flash, Air and Reader at all times as well. Especially Flash. Using Firefox of any version in combination with anything less than Flash 10 will cause a memory leak if you view any page with Flash in it. The leak will continue even if the page is closed but won't be as pronounced as it is when the page is open. Since Flash is used in many pages just for advertising these days, its very difficult to work around so keep your software updated. Before Flash 10, I had to close Firefox at least several times a day to recover memory. Often it would balloon to over a gigabyte of memory used. Now I only close firefox when I reboot my computer. Which isn't very often with Windows 7. Only when I install some software package that requires it. Running on 10 days uptime now and Firefox has been open that entire time as it is one of my startup programs.

If an update starts causing erratic behavior, then its most likely an addon that needs to be updated as well. When ever I had problems with Firefox it was because of either Adblock or NoScript. I don't use these addons because they would cause data loss, pauses in Firefox and memory issues over time.

You can test if Firefox Addons are causing your issues by opening it with a new profile. You can see how to do that here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Creating_a...ile_on_Windows