Picasa + web browser = unusable system (hijackthis log attached)

Vaio VPCCW26FX
64 bit W7 home premium
4 GB ram
500GB HDD
Nvidia GT 330M

Problem: when I have any web browser (I've tried ff, ie, chrome, safari) open and I open a photo management program (I've tried picasa and windows live photo gallery beta), my computer begins to slow down until everything starts "not responding". Same thing happens if I open the photo program first. Sometimes I'm able to launch the task manager and kill ff (for example) but the process then stays in my task manager for upwards of 30 minutes until I just hold down the power button and start over. same behavior is seen if I kill the piacasa process (for example). the system is basically hosed until I restart. I know that ff is notorious for having memory leaks, so I do monitor its memory levels as I'm using it. this behavior is seen no matter how high or low its memory usage is. I can duplicate this behavior.

I'm running MS Security Essentials (which is up to date), and I have done two complete scans in safe mode. One found the VLC installer, which has now been cleaned by MSSE. the second scan found nothing. I have also run SpyBot S/D which found a few tracking cookies and nothing else.

I downloaded the latest Nvidia driver from the Nvidia website, but running it only updated my HD Audio. W7 tells me that the video driver is up to date; I even pointed windows to the newly downloaded driver and it still says I'm up to date.

I've attached my hijackthis log. Thank you all in advance for your help and advice.

 

UPDATE: I made some adjustments to Picasa and I have it running well with my browser.

- completely disabled face detection, which was chugging along in the background and shredding my processor. first, turn it off in the options. then, disable it per folder. then, delete any associations it already made. you can eventually get rid of the folder in picasa entirely.

- turn off picasa's inclusion of video files. this also takes forever.

- open picasa alone and let it run for about an hour with nothing else happening on the computer. then close picasa, restart, open picasa on its own again, and leave it for about 30 more minutes. for some reason, picasa was doing all sorts of background things that were causing it to run my whole machine into the ground.

I do like picasa (though it has its maddening points) so I was hoping to get it to work alongside firefox. I think this was the solution.

 

very good, thank you. :cool