Firefox 8.0 disables touchpad vertical scrolling

Question

When vertical scrolling in Firefox, the scrolling icon appears on screen but no scrolling occurs. Scrolling works fine in IE, Word, etc. This has been happening intermittently for several months but now seems to be permanent. Oddly, scrolling works for about 30 seconds in Firefox after booting up the computer, but then stops working in Firefox while continuing to work in all other browsers/programs.
Update:
This answer does not work:
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/892941#answer-270356
This person tried the same solution and it did not work for them either:
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/892636#answer-270016
This person says they rolled back their touchpad driver and that worked:
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/889913#answer-267877
But my driver hasn't changed in years and works everywhere else, so that does not seem to be the source of my problem.
11/13: Ok, thanks Firefox techs for trying so hard to address this problem. Just kidding. I'm switching to Opera.

Answer 1

The slow / hesitant scrolling problem seems to be an artifact of the database Firefox uses to keep track of where you go, what you do, etc. It uses sqlite databases which get fragmented over time.
There are several fixes:
Some are add-ons and work internally, such as Vacuum Places (search the addons for it).
Some are external. Speedyfox is one I just tried, and found to work quite well. I think it did a better job than Vacuum Places, but requires Firefox to be shut down before it can work properly.
Find Speedyfox using a web search.