firefox and chrome freezing

pippa80

Hi there,

I'm wondering whether anyone here can offer any advice. In the past few weeks both firefox and chrome have been occasionally freezing. It tends to happen on certain pages including twitter, and when signing out of facebook, but also other pages too. When this happens, I can't even get task manager to come up and have to hard reboot. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling firefox and chrome. Avast says that all our software is up to date and everything looks ok.

Does this sound like something I need to get repaired or is there something I can try myself?

Many thanks,

Pippa

waddler_8

Try disabling all your third party add-ons. It's likely one of them.

http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187443

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-remove-add-ons

Re-enable them one at a time and see if one particular one causes the freeze.

matttye

Sounds like a system wide crash and not just a Firefox/Chrome crash.

If you check the event viewer in Windows it may be able to give some indication as to what happened when the computer crashed.

Go to Start Menu > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > Windows Logs > System > click on the 'level' column to sort by level. Once you've done this, find the errors in the big list (not 'information' or 'warning') and try to find the error closest to your last crash. Note down the time of the crash when it happens to assist.

If you find an error that roughly corresponds with the time of the crash, post the information here.

This doesn't always help but sometimes it can do

pippa80

Ooh thanks mattye - actually there are a bunch that come from the freeze/crash that happened right before I posted this!

(Is this the right bit to post?)

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service ShellHWDetection with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{DD522ACC-F821-461A-A407-50B198B896DC}

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service EventSystem with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{1BE1F766-5536-11D1-B726-00C04FB926AF}

DCOM got error "1068" attempting to start the service netprofm with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{A47979D2-C419-11D9-A5B4-001185AD2B89}

DCOM got error "1068" attempting to start the service netman with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{BA126AD1-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}

The Network List Service service depends on the Network Location Awareness service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

The Network List Service service depends on the Network Location Awareness service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service WSearch with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{7D096C5F-AC08-4F1F-BEB7-5C22C517CE39}

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service WSearch with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{9E175B6D-F52A-11D8-B9A5-505054503030}

The Network List Service service depends on the Network Location Awareness service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

(The final one x6)

matttye

pippa80 wrote: »

Ooh thanks mattye - actually there are a bunch that come from the freeze/crash that happened right before I posted this!

(Is this the right bit to post?)

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service ShellHWDetection with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{DD522ACC-F821-461A-A407-50B198B896DC}

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service EventSystem with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{1BE1F766-5536-11D1-B726-00C04FB926AF}

DCOM got error "1068" attempting to start the service netprofm with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{A47979D2-C419-11D9-A5B4-001185AD2B89}

DCOM got error "1068" attempting to start the service netman with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{BA126AD1-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}

The Network List Service service depends on the Network Location Awareness service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

The Network List Service service depends on the Network Location Awareness service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service WSearch with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{7D096C5F-AC08-4F1F-BEB7-5C22C517CE39}

DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service WSearch with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{9E175B6D-F52A-11D8-B9A5-505054503030}

The Network List Service service depends on the Network Location Awareness service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

(The final one x6)

That 1084 error is most likely causing the crashes.

I've googled the error and I'm getting two different suggestions; one is to do with antiviruses. A lot of people have found that disabling their antivirus solves the problem. You may wish to try installing a different antivirus rather than leaving your computer unprotected.

The other suggests 'WSearch' is adware and Malwarebytes will remove it. Malwarebytes can be downloaded from here:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/malwarebytes_anti_malware.html

pippa80

Thanks mattye, I'll run malwarebytes and go from there!

matttye

pippa80 wrote: »

Thanks mattye, I'll run malwarebytes and go from there!

Good luck If that doesn't help post back and I'll dig deeper!

pippa80

Hmm - no malicious items found on malwarebytes.

Would it be worth switching anti-virus software?

waddler_8

Wsearch is most likely the legitimate windows search service.

http://www.blackviper.com/windows-services/windows-search/

C:\Windows\system32\SearchIndexer.exe

matttye

pippa80 wrote: »

Hmm - no malicious items found on malwarebytes.

Would it be worth switching anti-virus software?

I think you should try switching anti-virus software. Alternatively you could try disconnecting from the internet and turning your anti-virus off for a little while, but if the crash has something to do with being connected to the internet we won't be able to tell if that has helped.

I wouldn't recommend turning your anti-virus off altogether while you're still connected to the internet unless the crashes happen very frequently and you only have to disable it for a short time.

waddler_8 wrote: »

Wsearch is most likely the legitimate windows search service.

http://www.blackviper.com/windows-services/windows-search/

C:\Windows\system32\SearchIndexer.exe

Lots of malware/spyware/etc use windows filenames or similar to try and avoid detection.

pippa80

Thanks again mattye, we currently use avast (based on recommendations from here!) - any ideas of what else is good?

waddler - i've checked the add-ons, chrome doesn't have any that are active but does crash/freeze, so not sure that's the issue?