Around once every day or two days for roughly five minutes at a time firefox stops loading web pages. To be specific it doesn't load anything I attempt to open except for google homepage or google searches, which perform perfectly. Is this likely to be firefox or the router, or maybe the ISP. I haven't really looked to see if the problem occurs on other machines in the house as being the IT troubleshooter in the house, would have heard of the problem it it had. Restarting the app or OS doesn't give any clues either way.



Also, when I'm typing a message in firefox (haven't noticed the problem in other apps), when I type ' or " or ^ , it doesn't register until I type another character afterwards. Any suggestions? I don't really want to reinstall to see if that solves anything as I would lose saved data etc.

My first thought is to do a thorough spyware check. I'm thinking this because of the character problems, which sounds like it might possibly be a key logger. It probably isn't, but you should check anyway.

Does IE work when FF stops? If so, it's probably a plug-in. Try disabling them.

If no one else is complaining, then it's unlikely to be the router or ISP. However, the only way to be sure is to try their machines when it happens.

Also, the next time it stops responding do a few network tests from the command prompt.

1. netstat - any suspicious looking connections there?
2. ping bbc.co.uk and any other site you can't load.
3. ping 212.58.224.138 - that's the BBC again, but bypassing the DNS lookup

That is standard for many keyboard layouts. It allows you to type things like éáê etc.

My German layout does that. The UK layout doesn't, but I think International English does have these "compose" keys.

Thanks, I think that explains it. This laptop came with a UK layout 30 months ago but it died and I had to replace it with an international one a few months back. Strange that I haven't noticed it in other apps though.