firefox starts silently and uses up my processor
Since today, Firefox starts automatically as a silent process consuming 30% of my cpu time and some 7 MB of memory usage. This happens on startup or while no visible Firefox is running. Killing the process causes the Firefox to restart, again silently, within a few seconds.
Opening a Firefox window for web browsing causes another Firefox process to start (parallel to the other one).
A file system search (search companion) for firefox.exe gives the following result: firefox.exe.hdmp firefox.exe.mdmp firefox.exe.hdmp firefox.exe.mdmp firefox.exe.hdmp firefox.exe.mdmp firefox.exe.hdmp firefox.exe.mdmp firefox.exe.hdmp firefox.exe.mdmp FIREFOX.EXE-28641590.pf firefox.exe
I recently installed a program GrooveDown v0.89 (just in case that would be useful information)
Chosen solution
Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.
Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.
- Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - SuperAntispyware:
http://www.superantispyware.com/ - Microsoft Safety Scanner:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx - Windows Defender: Home Page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx - Spybot Search & Destroy:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html - Kasperky Free Security Scan:
http://www.kaspersky.com/security-scan
You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.
See also:
- "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked
All Replies (2)
Chosen Solution
Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.
Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.
- Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - SuperAntispyware:
http://www.superantispyware.com/ - Microsoft Safety Scanner:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx - Windows Defender: Home Page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx - Spybot Search & Destroy:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html - Kasperky Free Security Scan:
http://www.kaspersky.com/security-scan
You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.
See also:
- "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked
Thanks, it was indeed a malware program that identified itself as firefox.exe. After uninstall of Firefox and restart it was suddenly changed into setup.exe. I also got numerous crash reports of some program aagltkl that according to my virus protection (Comodo) was the same as that setup.exe. Where Comodo didn't find it, Kaspersky did and cleaned my system (I hope). Of course I re-installed firefox :-)