Browser problems in Vista

I Hope someone can help with a frustrating problem I have with Vista Premium 32bit.
I recently bought a new pc and was forced to accept Vista. I have a major problem in that no matter which internet browser I use it stops working after about 20 mins or so. My internet connection is still working as I can still download emails and use msn etc. The problem is that none of the browsers I have tried will load pages and the browser freezes. When I go into Task manager I cannot stop the exec file relating to the Browser. I have tried all the main browsers with the same issue. The only way to resolve the issue is to reboot my pc. This means I have around 20 mins of browsing then I have to reboot. I never had this problem with xp. Is this a know bug in Vista? Does anyone have any suggestions?

Have you checked for any viruses/malware/trojans harbouring itself on your computer.

Yes. Not found any problems in this respect. To be honest, I seem to have have had this problem from day one of using Vista. I have Vista with SP1.

what browswer have you tried.

I am currently using a browser that has been open since around 11am and with 26 tabs open, and its vista.

We need far far more details

What browser
What antivirus
What firewall
how your connecting to the internet

I have tried IE7, Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. I use Avast Anti Virus and Zone Alarm Fire Wall. I am with Sky Broadband. I do not use a wireless connection.

Have you done your 'updates' ?

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

I have tried IE7, Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. I use Avast Anti Virus and Zone Alarm Fire Wall. I am with Sky Broadband. I do not use a wireless connection.

There seems to be issues with Firefox 3, Zonealarm, Vista combination that cause the same problems you're having. A visit to Mozilla(firefox) forums, or Zonelab forums could be worth a try, but uninstalling Zonealarm generally seems to do the trick. You can always enable the Vista firewall while testing, and if successful, maybe try a different firewall.

Edited by dieselglider (Wed 25-Feb-09 00:01:51)

Just leave Windows Firewalll enabled after uninstalling ZoneAlarm. Theres not much point in going overboard as your already have a hardware firewall built-into the Sky router.

This seems to be a problem with internet explorer im having similar issues with it in vista x64. it may be due to the flash plugin but no one seems to know for sure

It's always the 'security' software.

John.

Thanks for the help everyone. I shall try uninstalling zone alarm when I get home from work tonight.

Why not try shutting down Zone Alarm first?

I had exactly the same problems as you. I shut down ZAPro but the freezes continued. I uninstalled ZAPro, and was error free for three days. I've just reinstalled ZAPro to see what happens.

In reply to a post by Sark:

It's always the 'security' software.

John.

it is yes, where the majority of problems with the PC start imho

Thanks for the help everyone.
I have uninstalled Zone Alarm and will see how things go over the next few days.

Three hours after putting ZAPro back on the freezees started again. It seems a lot of people are having various problems with 3.0.6

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_for...

dont use ZA - use sunbelt personal firewall, much better

Thanks have downloaded and will give it a try.

Nobody got a work-around for these issues yet?

Don't think so. Mine was to reformat and change from ZAPro to Sunbelt Personal Firewall and Avast anti virus. Got rid of AVG as well. IE7 is running well. Not sure if I will chance FF 3.0.6 yet. However it is running on the other lappy together with ZAPro and AVG with no problems

Do you have anti-virus installed which includes a link scanner or similar? Try disabling it!

I've had some major problems, similar to what you describe - everything connected to the internet bar my browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome). I scoured the internet for solutions and tried just about everything, including a clean re-install. I even switched from AVG to Avast following the re-install but still replicated the problem. Another feature of the issue was that I couldn't even kill the browser process from the Task Manager: the only effective cure being a reboot.

Today I nearly pulled my remaining hair out as none of my browsers would access my own website - particularly helpful as it's just gone live. Even rebooting didn't work - whichever browser I used simply told me it could not connect to the site - I knew this was unlikely as everything on the server was intact. I tried to access the site from another machine (runnning XP) and, hey-presto, it worked with no problem at all.

I tried resetting winsock etc, uninstalled Vista service pack 1 and ZoneAlarm but still couldn't connect to the site from my Vista machine. By this time I knew the site was definitely still online because I received an email from someone via the website.

I then attempted to connect from a third (also XP) machine on my network, this time, I was also unable to connect. I checked all my network and firewall settings - they were fine.

Finally, after more searching of the internet, I found a forum where the concensus appeared to be that the problem was probably related to security software, AVG was mentioned. This reminded me that the main difference between the machine which would display the site and the two which wouldn't was the link scanner in AVG and the Avast Web Shield were active on the PCs which wouldn't show the site and disabled on the one that would.

I deactivated the web components in question and connected to my site straight away.

I don't know if this will resolve the intermittent browser disconnect, but I'll try and keep you posted.

Hope this helps (even if it meant putting up with reading how miserable I've been the whole day!).