"firefox has stopped working" upon startup

Question

Few seconds upon start-up, Firefox greys out and the message "firefox has stopped working" appears leaving me with only the option of closing it. I've tried resetting firefox to default state and safe mode with add-on disabled etc but so far the only reliable method I've found is to reinstall it every time, however this only guarantees one use as once I've closed the browser the same problem re-occurs. The only major action I've performed may have been accidentally removing youtube(which contributed to a major portion of my browsing history) from the browsing history after which caused Firefox to lag/freeze and crash and hence my problem began. I tried the profile manager but that crashes on start up as well.
I'm on Windows 7 & Firefox 14.0.1

Answer 1

Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.<br />
You need to scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.<br />
Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.<br /><br />
*http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
*http://www.superantispyware.com/ - SuperAntispyware
*http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx - Microsoft Safety Scanner
*http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx - Windows Defender: Home Page
*http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html - Spybot Search & Destroy
You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.
*http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/solutions?qid=208280684
See also:
*"Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked