FireFox v. 110.0 Consumes C Drive

When FF v.110.0 is launched or selected from the pin on the task bar, C drive utilization goes to 100% and stays there for up to ten minutes. At this point, no key strokes nor mouse cursor moves will register and things are frozen until disk utilization falls off. FF launches 9-12 processes and they are alternately using small amounts of CPU cycles to produce the home page (Google news). I understand FF does this when operating, but I don't understand why it's locking up the disk drive for so long. V. 109 didn't do this disk hogging. I get crickets from Mozilla on this. I reinstalled FF even using the install download from the v.109 update, but it reinstalled v.110 and the problem persists. I'm at a loss to know what to do other than wait for the next FF update.

"Memory leak". I don't pretend to understand what it means, or what causes it or how it happens, but it's a known phenomenon and there are plenty of web search results.

jamis said:

When FF v.110.0 is launched or selected from the pin on the task bar, C drive utilization goes to 100% and stays there for up to ten minutes. At this point, no key strokes nor mouse cursor moves will register and things are frozen until disk utilization falls off. FF launches 9-12 processes and they are alternately using small amounts of CPU cycles to produce the home page (Google news). I understand FF does this when operating, but I don't understand why it's locking up the disk drive for so long. V. 109 didn't do this disk hogging. I get crickets from Mozilla on this. I reinstalled FF even using the install download from the v.109 update, but it reinstalled v.110 and the problem persists. I'm at a loss to know what to do other than wait for the next FF update.

Best way to remove Firefox is to use REVO Uninstaller (free). After it finishes uninstalling, make sure you scan for an remove leftovers. Then, search your C: drive (Windows drive), for: Mozilla, and then for Firefox.
Remove everything those searches find, except for items in the WinSxS folder. Leave those alone.

Then do a clean install of Firefox, and immediately go to Tools > Settings > General... and scroll down and select this option...







If you don't think you can beat Firefox's updating, then after the clean install DON'T run Firefox.
Instead drop this "Distribution" folder into: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox

distribution.zip



That will keep Firefox from updating. Then go to Settings and choose the "Check for updates but let me install them" option.
THEN you can delete the Distribution folder.





I don't think FF 110.0 is the problem. I see NO issues on FF 110.0
It's more like you have an infection or as @idgat mentioned, a memory leak.

I didn't get any of your problems when I updated to v110.

If you want to try going back to v109 or earlier then use
Install an older version of Firefox - Firefox Help
or just restore a system image from before the first v110 update attempt.


Best of luck,
Denis

Well this turned out to be sort of a perfect storm issue. After much troubleshooting, I finally found the culprit causing the beginning of the HDD hang. A process called "Windows Compatibility Telemetry" would run, grab the HDD and then occasionally read/write and use the internet connection, but keep the drive allocated at 100 %. The user wouldn't know it until an application would try to access the drive with something like FireFox. I disabled the offending process in the Registry and after a reboot, the problem seems to have gone away. MS can bugger off knowing what my system is doing, since it's not compatible with W11 anyway.

Along the way, I discovered that the last CUM update screwed up the antivirus support on this system. Part of Windows Defender was turned on (which I don't use) and it was fighting with the active Norton 360 application. Windows keeps notifying that AV is not turned on and to turn on Norton 360 and that the system has no firewall protection. Norton is/was running, but the WD firewall was enabled along with the Norton firewall. Got the WD firewall turned off and now the "Windows Antimalware Service Executable" isn't contesting for resources with Norton. System is much faster now. Thanks again for the assistance.

Just a further update on this problem. The problem resurfaced and it looked like Microsoft Windows Search Indexer was tying up the drive. I disabled the process at startup and the issue seemed to get better. Following advice from Megahertz, I ran CHKDSK, SFC, and DISM, which all found and fixed corruption on the C drive. Problem appears to be fixed, but I really don't know what caused it. I suspect the February Patch Tuesday updates, as that's when the issue started. If it was, I think the DISM runs may have fixed it.