Limping Marathon Runner

Firefox 3 got over its beta and announced an official release. Every software has its buggy day. Which hasn't? I went ahead to install Firefox 3. First issue encountered was that there weren't any firefox.exe in my program files folder. What?! The recommended step was to re-run it and so I did. The next complain from the system was that I have a missing .dll file. What the?! Yet again, I double clicked the installation file for the third time and when I started up Firefox 3, it complained about some xml error. Thanks. Fallback plan. I uninstalled Firefox 3, which the system claimed that it had no entry in the install / uninstall program files. *faint* I had to remove files and delete registries. Finally installing back Firefox 2.0.x, I started up firefox and to my amazement (or should I say, I'm not amazed) to find out that my web surfing experience is back to those days of a 28.8kbps modem. Strange enough, it only affected websites that contained flash. What's worse? It's intermittent. I closed my Firefox 2.0.x and thought - oh well, back to the old IE days, I guess. Thank you, but no thank you, my IE suffered from the same slow, dying, painful dial-up Internet experience. After a couple of googling (took me like hours to view pages), I still had no clue. I tried installing other browsers which didn't work as well. I tried uninstalling and re-installing flash plug-in for Firefox and IE - nope, didn't work. Eventually, I thought of this. Why don't I run in safe mode for Firefox? Viola! It did work. I moved from website to website for close to 30mins and there weren't any issues at all. I restarted Firefox and disabled all add-ons and themes. It was back to the normal state, where everything works fine. All I can say is this line of work is not for the weak minds.