Firefox freezes during various operations (scrolling, filling form fields, clicking through the options menu, etc.)

Question

Almost any activity in Firefox is subject to brief freezing. The freeze lasts anywhere from (approx.) 1/2 second to 3 seconds. I searched online and I came across an article stating the freezes may be due to Anti-Virus software. The work-around presented was to set browser.sessionstore.enabled to false. The idea is Firefox does not attempt to write to a file, and so my AV software doesn't waste time checking if the access is valid. The change had some positive effect. The freezes now occur less often.
However, the freezes still occur every few seconds, still to the point of major annoyance. So what I did was run Process Monitor while Firefox was running to see if the freezes coincided with file accesses. Indeed they do.
I would like to know if I can change a setting which will cause Firefox to not access these files (or files like these) so often:
firefox.exe QueryOpen C:\WINDOWS\system32\msimtf.dll
firefox.exe ReadFile C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\Cache\_CACHE_001_
firefox.exe LockFile C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\content-prefs.sqlite
firefox.exe QueryOpen C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\Cache\5ACD1B8Ed01
firefox.exe WriteFile C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\cookies.sqlite-journal
There are hundreds of such accesses over just tens of seconds. These files are accessed while I'm e.g. scrolling down the page. I could understand if they were accessed while loading or drawing the page, but again this is occurring while I'm merely scrolling down the page and typing in this very text box!

Answer 1

Almost any activity in Firefox is subject to brief freezing. The freeze lasts anywhere from (approx.) 1/2 second to 3 seconds. I searched online and I came across an article stating the freezes may be due to Anti-Virus software. The work-around presented was to set browser.sessionstore.enabled to false. The idea is Firefox does not attempt to write to a file, and so my AV software doesn't waste time checking if the access is valid. The change had some positive effect. The freezes now occur less often.
However, the freezes still occur every few seconds, still to the point of major annoyance. So what I did was run Process Monitor while Firefox was running to see if the freezes coincided with file accesses. Indeed they do.
I would like to know if I can change a setting which will cause Firefox to not access these files (or files like these) so often:
firefox.exe QueryOpen C:\WINDOWS\system32\msimtf.dll
firefox.exe ReadFile C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\Cache\_CACHE_001_
firefox.exe LockFile C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\content-prefs.sqlite
firefox.exe QueryOpen C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\Cache\5ACD1B8Ed01
firefox.exe WriteFile C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k33hi6th.default\cookies.sqlite-journal
There are hundreds of such accesses over just tens of seconds. These files are accessed while I'm e.g. scrolling down the page. I could understand if they were accessed while loading or drawing the page, but again this is occurring while I'm merely scrolling down the page and typing in this very text box!