FF15 hangs whenever plugin-container.exe is loaded in memory

Question

I need help. Since at least in v14 and now v15, FF hangs becoming unresponsive whenever plugin-container.exe is loaded in memory, as monitored with Process Explorer of SysInternals. This happens in FF with all plugins manually disabled and with no extensions, loaded in either "normal" or safe mode, even after having reset it to default state in about:support. (The unresponsiveness is not absolute, since every some 90 seconds there is a brief refresh of the screen as indicated by an acknowledging screen change due to a prior click or mouse motion. (In this quasi-frozen condition, FF slowly ramps up its memory usage while plugin-container keeps alternating between two smaller vales in Process Explorer.) After some 15-20+ minutes, plugin-container unloads itself and FF starts responding again. If I then visit a page that triggers the loading of plugin-container, the described problem develops once more. Blocking the loading of plugin-container (e.g.,renaming or moving it out or blocking it with the firewall) hangs FF. The solution for FF 3.6.6 for dom.ipc in about:config does not work in these versions.
Ironically, the Mozilla support page about "Firefox crashes when loading certain pages" (http://goo.gl/i02Xz) is a page that loads automatically plugin-container and hangs my machine, so I had to enter the forums by selecting a different problem.
This occurs in a Windows-7 machine with sufficient memory (1025 MB physical, 1025 MB virtual) and a lean configuration (monitored and enforced with Autoruns and Process Explorer), which runs very well other browsers such as Chrome, Opera o IE9. I have been using FF since its v2 and would hate to switch permanently to a different browser. Any informed advice on how to fix the problem (or disable the plugin- container in a working manner) would be much appreciated. TIA.

Answer 1

<b>Solved by blocking the loading of Plugin Container . . .</b>
Searching in the bugzilla.mozilla.org site for text or attachments on bugs related to <i>dom.ipc.plugins....</i>, I encountered several references to a Windows environment variable <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">MOZ_DISABLE_OOP_PLUGINS</span>, for example in the patch at http://goo.gl/jYJKL. I then added this variable to the Windows 7 system environment of my machine setting it to 1. It works : FF15 no longer loads plugin container (and therefore does not hang) when visiting web pages that before froze the browser.<p>NB : As I discovered shortly thereafter in googling this environment variable, this method of blocking the loading of plugin container was already reported 3 weeks ago by <b>big_v</b> in the Mozilla support forum, http://goo.gl/v7prA. Chapeau.