[RESOLVED] Something is "phoning home"?

[Bill Heffner]

I'm not sure where to post this, but I have been through the "HijackThis" process and Broni has pronounced my computer free of malware. See the post entitled "not-a-virus:AdWare.Win32.RK.ao" in the "HijackThis Logs" forum. Broni said I should post in the "general forum" if my problems continued, and they are doing so.

When I open either FF(3.5) or IE(7) and begin browsing all is well at first. Then the cursor begins to freeze momentarily from time to time and, less often, I will hear a double "boop-boop" sound. The first is on a rising tone and the second on a falling one. Sometimes there is only one pair of tones, sometimes two in rapid succession.

For a while there are long intervals between these behaviors, but the longer I am online the more frequent they become. Time varies, but after some time they become so frequent that the computer becomes essentially unusable.

The behavior does not stop when I close the browser, but if I leave the computer with all applications closed, when I return to it and use applications that are not online the system is fine. When I then open a browser there is no problem for a while, sometimes quite a long while, and then the problem starts again.

I upgraded to FF 3.5 today, and the problem seems to be considerably less severe, but it is still doing it to some degree, and it worries me. Does anyone have anything to offer that might clear up this annoying mystery?

Update: 8:10am
And sometimes it stops doing it altogether. I'm beginning to get some dire suspicions about a Firefox addon called FireFTP. I've been using it for quite a few months, but I wonder if it might have just updated itself or something. I've had it idle for the past while and the problem stopped.