Odd images appearing in Firefox

Running XP SP3 and Firefox 9 (just upgraded to the latest about a week ago). I performed a cache clear the other night and have been seeing some odd behavior since. Some, but not all, sites are having seemingly random images rendering. Filler graphics to complete the border from one site are appearing as pictures of an infant's face (it renders correctly on other machines). The northern CA traffic map (http://traffic.511.org/traffic_map.asp) is not loading at all. It continually tries to refresh the data, and there's a small standard portrait shot that's not part of the page that appears in the upper corner of the partially rendered page.

I have Zone Alarm and Avira installed & I'm running a full scan, but this was odd enough I wasn't even sure how to start looking for a cause, let alone a solution.

Any direction would be appreciated. Thanks, Brian

 

Hi Brian, there are a few things you could test before running our standard malware procedure, try this first:

Create a new Firefox profile, select it and disable all add-ons before starting Firefox. Hold down the left Shift key as you mouse click the FX icon to bring up the required window to enable these options.

Test it out for a while, if you see no problems then enable Flash if you have it, test again. Repeat for the plug-ins that you must have (Silverlight perhaps). All the plug-ins can be enabled/disable 'on the fly', you simply refresh the page after a change.

If you have no problems with a basic set of plug-ins loaded, move on to installing your must have extensions. Again, install and test singly - extensions cannot be switched on the fly, a restart is needed to enable/disable them.

Let us know your findings, if it's an obvious Firefox profile/add-ons problem, we can move the thread over to software, if it looks like it might be malware, we'll ask you to begin with the Read and Run.

 

Bingo. Stopping the add-ons gets everything rendering as it should. It never would have occurred to me to look there. I don't have many installed & they're all invisible to me now, but starting in safe mode clears up everything. Thank you very much. Now to dig out the culprit...

 

Good luck with it, I'll ask to get the thread moved to software so that they can help you out from the main forum if you have further problems.

 

See if Zonealarm is the one given the problem? It's one of the notorious ones, according to Mozillazine forums, that don't seem to play nice with Firefox. If that's the case you would need to switch to another FW.

EDIT: just noticed that your problem was solved. Sorry!