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Solved: Why won't my laptop run Firefox?

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Curt:
Last August I lost my PC and was forced to take this old laptop into use. To my surprise it won't run Firefox, but only Internet Explorer! This is of course not some management restriction, but merely my real life experience; the Mozilla browser will launch but never go anywhere or open any homepage. Or it will launch, but everything takes longer than forever. And I mean several minutes to (not) open a page. Even with low safety settings and without any safety related program being open! SOMETIMES Firefox will open some pages, or simple pages, but not flash or complex pages - but most times it won't go anywhere at all!

Understand that my test results are sparse because I lose patience long before any homepage connection was made.

***Each and every other program that I have installed will connect to the Internet without a problem***

I have not been able to find any security related setting from the previous owner anywhere.
Computer, drivers, flash and everything are fully updated, so to speak; the laptop seems to be from 2009...

It has now been half a year and I have no more ideas about where to go or what to do, except asking YOU!  :tellme:

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5 years ago the laptop was above average:
Dell Latitude Z600, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU U9600 @ 1.60GHz, Data Width 64 Bits, Caption x64 Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10 Family 191 Level 6 Stepping , Current Clock Speed 1601 MHZ , Ext Clock 200 MHZ , L2 Cache Size 3072 KB - Memory Device 0 and Memory Device 1 Size 4095 MB
Win 7 Home Premium 32-bits (year 2010 upgraded from Vista).

Edvard:
Have you tried the tried-and-often-true method of simply uninstalling and re-installing?  Try tracking down and erasing any user configuration files as well (back them up first, you may end up needing them).

Have you tried running Firefox from a command prompt?  Often, this will give you some logging as it runs, and reports errors it encounters.  Could be a missing library that it doesn't have a specific error message for, or a configuration has it looking for something that isn't in it's expected place.  Give it a try if you haven't already, and let us know what you find (or not).

Shades:
Sounds like the network configuration from FF is botched. Get a portable version of FF and try again (to my knowledge this version doesn't use anything but the bog standard network settings).

If that works, you can either continue using portable FF or install FF and use the settings from the portable one (profiles from both FF's are separated).

If this also won't work, take a good look at your network configuration in IE (perhaps it is set to use a (3rd party) proxy, which could filter traffic depending on browser or whatnot.

FF asks you, just after installation, if it should copy settings from IE before it connects to a website the first time. If you didn't do that before, try this and see how that goes. Or vice versa.

MilesAhead:
It might also be worth installing an older version of FF.  Try something that was released in 2009.  If it runs gangbusters after importing the same profile it could be some compatibility issue.  Also try disabling all AddOns.  I found just a week or so ago that Session Save and Restore was causing all sorts of nini-hangs.

What FF are you running now?

mouser:
Shades idea of trying a portable version of FF (if such a thing exists) is a good one.

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