Connecting to the internet

What ho one and all,

Hope Santa brought you all your worldly desires.

For the past few days, I am having difficultly connecting to the internet. Running XP Pro and an old version of Firefox ESR (that is not the problem.) FF boots as it always has, but the first page to appear (home) now takes about 100 seconds. Once it has appeared, everything runs as it should.

I have tried in Safe Mode, but still, 100 seconds for the first page. E-mail is fine and my wife's computer is connected to the same router and she has no issues. I uninstalled FF and removed the D&S / Mozilla folder, reinstalled from the original .exe file, and before I reinstated the profile, it still took around 100 seconds for the first page..

Additionally, my home page is www.thebigproject.co.uk/original from where I frequently hit the BBC news link. This link now generates an error in connection message;none of the other links do. If I hit the BBC Sport, it goes to the page, from where clicking News takes me to the BBC news. Have no idea if this is part of the issue or not.

Ran a scan with MSE / AntiMalware / SpyBot and all appears clean.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Rex

May want to upgrade your FF as that page slams open for me.
By the way, I corrected the spelling of project as the original link Said no such page exist.
May just need a new link to the page after trying the correction.

Apologies for the typo. The problem has nothing do do with the version of FF as everything was fine until a few days ago.

FF boots just fine, but I have a 'Connecting' tab flashing for the first page. Usually, the first page is my home page, but if I select from any of the bookmarks (and they are all available) that first page still is taking around 100 seconds. Right now, I have clicked on the VirtualDr link to this thread in the e-mail and that has taken around 100 seconds to open, after FF has fired up.

I read this morning that it could be a Flash update needed (it was already up-to-date), so have done that but still no difference. I did troubleshoot and reset, and that was OK, but then I don't have any of the Add-ons that I like and use.

The strange thing is that I have a newer ESR version runninig on my VM and it is fine. A few weeks ago, I upgrade to that same version, installed the same Add-ons, and it was terrible. So went back to the older version which was running fine (until a few days ago.)

Once the first page is up and running, everything is normal. Run all the scans and removed a few trackers and other bits and pieces, but no difference.

As an aside, my wife is running an even older version of FF (in Japanese) and that has not problems whatsoever.

Rex

I had a similar issue with Chrome on my now retired XP Pro machine. I never did find a solution and learned to live with it.

Was so p***ed off last night that I restored from an image taken about one month ago. Still made no difference, which is strange since when I took the image, all was fine.

Ever since the BBC news site went down a few days ago, I have been experiencing exactly the same problem.

In Firefox, if I click on the BBC news site (www.bbc.com/news), I get a "The connection was reset" message. If I click on the link again, the page loads normally.

In Internet Explorer, I have the same problem.

No other sites have this problem.

I have cleared my cookies, cache etc, to no avail.

Very strange

I had a sneaking suspicion that the problem might have been something left over on the BBC site after the hack.

Looks like it was. It's working normally now.

Rex--how many extensions do you have? A large number could delay FF starting up.

Have you tried running it in Firefox Safe-Mode?

If the problem is only on one site, then the site is having a problem, not you. You just have to wait it out. Surprised no one thought of that.

Try setting your home page to a blank page, as detailed below.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...firefox-starts

Exit Firefox, reboot, open Firefox. If it still takes 100 seconds, then you most likely have a problem with some add-on taking a long time to initialize. Try downloading and running the portable version of Firefox. If that has the same issue, with no add-ons, then you may have a different problem.