Does anyone have problems with Firefox on a Dell computer?

I recently bought a new Dell Dimension 3000 desktop running Windows XP. Soon after, I downloaded the Firefox browser. I'm not sure if the problem is connected to that but four or five times now, the computer has suddenly shut down leaving a blue screen with the message that there's been a problem and it's located in the intel52.sys file. It suggests it may be because of any recently installed programs - I haven't installed much and the problem always seems to happpen when I'm online. Wondering if it's connected to using Firefox.

Does that make any sense and has anyone else experienced anything similar? I can use a computer but have no idea how they work or what makes them tick (or not tick).

Thanks for any ideas or help.

Do you have all your security progs installed? Anti-virus, Spybot, Ad-aware, etc?

With virus scan, firewall and anti-spyware. I don't have either spybot or ad-aware though i used them both in my old computer.

Not directly anyway.

I have no idea what intel52.sys does, but based on your problem and assuming Windoze is reporting the cause for the crash accurately, I'm guessing it has some relationship to your networking, possibly a driver of some sort. And, it apparently has been borked, possibly by an installation process.

The standard Windoze install wizard has a known history of doing this. (I think, but am not certain, that FF uses that wizard. I haven't done a FF install on a Windoze machine in awhile now.) I haven't experienced it since Win98, but I experienced it often when using that OS. I installed MS Office once, and it killed a .sys and a .dll that I needed just to boot the system, and unfortunately the only solution for that I had available to me was reinstalling the OS.

Did the system come with a system restore disk you could use to return it back to factory settings? If so, that may be your solution. I wouldn't do that just yet until others with possible more knowledge of the specific problem have had a chance to consider it, but that may be where you're headed. If you know someone else with WinXP that also has that file on their system, you *might* be able to delete it from yours and copy it from theirs. Several things will have to be exactly the same for this to work, but it's possible. I did this when fixing yet another corruption issue.

The problem could also be indicative of an imminent failure of a hard drive and not related to an installation process at all. Even though it is new, Dell often uses cheap drives in their systems, such as those from Maxtor, that can fail early and often. Even good drives can fail, though, so it may just be one of those things. Try running your disk cleanup and error checking tools to see if there are any errors on the disc that might indicate a larger problem.

I'm pretty sure they included the system restore disk with the system though I will take your advice and not go that route yet. I did run the disk cleanup which didn't turn anything up and I also ran the PC check program on Dell's support website. That only reported a couple of minor updates in the Microsoft Office program and Sun Java which were due but I don't think the problem stems from there (though what do I know?).

I am relieved that neither of you think it's Firefox - I'd much rather run it than IE. Perhaps in the next day or so, I'll sit down to a session with Dell support and see if they can turn anything up.

Thanks for the response! :hi: (I love this forum - it's helped me out more than once)