Unfortunately, uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox often does not solve problems caused by bad add-ons or malware. I'll describe how to create two kinds of backups for your bookmarks, but then suggest an approach to malware cleanup that hopefully will resolve the issue.

Backing up and Exporting Boookmarks

Try creating both a backup file and an export file in your Documents folder or other safe location. (By safe I mean it won't get removed by an uninstaller.)

• Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer
• Export Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file to back up or transfer bookmarks

Rooting Out Bad Add-ons and Malware

Here's the method I suggest for investigating a possible bad add-on:

(1) Open the Windows Control Panel, Uninstall a Program. After the list loads, click the "Installed on" column heading to group the infections, I mean, additions, by date. This can help in smoking out undisclosed bundle items that snuck in with some software you agreed to install. Take out as much trash as possible here.

(2) Open Firefox's Add-ons page using either:

• Ctrl+Shift+a
• "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Plugins. Set nonessential and unrecognized plugins to "Never Activate".

In the left column, click Extensions. Then, if in doubt, disable (or Remove, if possible) unrecognized and unwanted extensions.

Often a link will appear above at least one disabled extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.

Any improvement?

(3) You can search for remaining issues with the scanning/cleaning tools listed in our support article: Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware. These on-demand scanners are free and take considerable time to run. If they finish quickly and especially if they require payment, you may have a serious infection. I suggest the specialized forums listed in the article in that case.

Checking Connection Settings

Firefox has a connection setting you might also want to check:

"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options > Advanced > Network mini-tab > "Settings" button

The default of "Use system proxy settings" should piggyback on your Windows/IE "LAN" setting. You could try "No proxy" to see whether that works better.

By the way, I had trouble finding information on your Newtab and Search Manager extensions, which is suspicious, and Web-to-Save definitely has something to do with ads.

Note that your System Details list shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts.

The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created this file and normally it wouldn't be there. You can check its content with a plain text editor (right-click: Open with) if you didn't create this file yourself.

The user.js file is read each time Firefox is started and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.

See:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved

You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:

• Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox

Windows hides some file extensions by default. Among them are .html and .ini and .js and .txt, so you may only see file name without file extension. You can see the real file type (file extension) in the properties of the file via the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer.

Thank you. Your information was very helpful.