FF won't restart in safe mode...it won't even shut down.

Question

you know that soft clicking noise you can hear in your computer? Mine stopped doing that a little while ago. It's eerily quiet.
Also, I keep getting hung up. If I watch a video on youtube (for example) FF freezes & I have to shut down the plug-in container to get things going again.
I've tried restarting the computer, but it didn't help. My system idle process is showing the number 99 in my task manager's CPU column, & I think that's related to my problems. Sometimes when I open task manager I can see that CPU Usage (at the bottom) is at 100%, but in a second it usually goes back down to 15% or less.
SO I came to the FF support page, where it was suggested that I '''restart my browser in safe mode. But it won't restart. '''It won't even shut down all the way. FF & the plug-in container are both showing as open in Task Manager.
SO when I manually shut them down, & then open FF again & check my plug-ins, none of them have been disabled (as they should be if FF had restarted in safe mode).

Answer 1

By soft clicking noise, what exactly do you mean? If you are hearing a clicking noise in your computer that then stopped, it is possibly your hard drive dying, or a fan in the computer that dies. You shouldn't have "clicking" noises in a PC.
As for system Idle Process, that is just the percentage of the CPU that isn't being used, if that is at 99%, it means that only 1% of your CPU is being used at that moment.
Now, as for starting Firefox in Safe Mode, let's try this. Restart your computer, then while you start Firefox, hold down the Shift Key. You should have a small box open up with a bunch of checkboxes. Don't check any of them right now. Just Continue in Safe Mode. This is Firefox safe mode, all customizations, themes, addons, etc. will be disabled. If you don't get the freezing here, restart Firefox, and disable your add-ons one by one until you find the culprit.
Also, you can try updating your graphics driver to see if this is an issue with Hardware acceleration. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-upgrade-my-graphics-drivers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-upgrade-my-graphics-drivers] has more details.