FireFox

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Having more than one plugin for the same thing is begging for issues, decide and remove whatever you won't be using and that will likely improve your situation.

[Griffin NoName]

The two plugins for history do different things. One is merely a button to open the full history window - ie. does the same things as on the menu, but as a button. I don't think that could interfere with the other history plug-in at all.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

They don't need to do the exact same thing, they only have to make the exact same low level call within the codebase to create a conflict.

[Griffin NoName]

They won't do that.

I think I've found the cause of my major issue. Which has always been that after a while there's some application which runs and runs and runs making it virtually impossible to use the machine. Couldn't find out what the application was even with advanced tools that I downloaded.  Not directly to do with FireFox (happens wien using IE too) but Firefox revealed it. It appears to be Shockwave. I set it to always ask and I've not been allowing it, and the machine perfoms normally.

I wonder if Shockwave (which has had loads of updates in the last few weeks) no longer works correctly with Vista.

Well, it's a theory.

EDIT a quick google - it may well be something of the sort