box of rocks

Some number of months ago I had loaded Firefox 3, and life has never been the same since. It kept hanging on me, so I eventually took it off, reinstalled Firefox 2, but even that seemed like it didn't work as well.

I have made numerous changes to my computer so that there is more wiggle room on the drive so reloaded FF3 thinking that would help. Meanwhile I had been using Chrome which is so fast I loved it. However, there were so many pages it would not work on, so that got annoying.

Two days into trying to use FF3 and it is hanging all the time. I check and it appears that the CPU usage is 100% Sometimes it even does this before I do anything. It opens to a blank page, as I have it set, then when I try to type in a search item it is slow responding to the typing, then hangs on the search or when trying to get to an article on the search. I have had it do this when I am just moving the scroll bar. It is not a true hang as eventually it appears to find enough resources to do its task, but it uses a huge amount of resources to do so. (I have 2gb of memory) Last time I closed FF down with task manager still running, opened IE, did the exact same thing, and everything was dandy.

Before re-installing FF I tried to wipe the disk clean of it, and failed miserably. Is there any FF uninstall program that gets rid of all traces of FF? I thought that might help get me out of whatever is going on. I had used FF for years. This last time, BTW, I took out most of my plugins leaving the google toolbar, and the one that lets you easily load a page in IE which I find handy on those pages that FF doesn't work on.

If no one has a suggestion, I will have to give up on FF again, as this is intolerable.

Thanks!