Libreoffice and Firefox take ages to start, get stuck at polling

Question

Hello. Whenever I launch Firefox or Libreoffice, they take around 15-20 seconds to start. I'm not using the Libreoffice Quickstarter here. When I searched online for others who've faced the same problem, I found this problem to afflict Firefox 4 and some older versions of Libreoffice. Both programs were supposed to have a problem with polling for something in the network; I didn't exactly understand what those people were talking about, sorry.
However, I did understand enough to disable both wireless and ethernet on my laptop and open both programs, and voila! Both opened in around 5-7 seconds. While I use NetworkManager for my networking needs, this problem was seen in wicd as well. I used strace, and I could see that there was a section where the word "POLLIN" jumped out at me where the execution would stop for 5 - 10 seconds whenever I started either FF or LO.
Another weird thing is that another friend of mine (on Arch 64 with Cinnamon) on the same network faces no such problems. His Firefox and Libreoffice start up as fast as mine do with my network turned off.
Some relevent hardware and software details:
Arch 64 on an Intel Nehalem i5 460M
Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe
NetworkManager and wicd installed, I prefer using NetworkManager
Has affected all Firefox versions from 19.0-1 onwards (when I installed arch on this laptop)
Has affected all LO versions from 4.0.0-1 till the present one
Also, if it's relevant, systemd-analyze blame tells me that NetworkManager and it's wait-online service regularly take around 29 and 16 seconds respectively, while wicd takes only around 2 seconds.
Last edited by genghizkhan91 (2013-05-05 09:34:40)

Answer 1

Other solutions
* https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic%20Troubleshooting#w_other-solutions
Do a MALWARE check with these Malware Scanning programs. You need to scan with all programs because each program detects different malware. Make sure that you UPDATE each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.
* Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware - http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
* SuperAntispyware - http://www.superantispyware.com/
* Windows Defender Home Page -
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx
* Spybot Search & Destroy - http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
* Ad-Aware Free - http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
There are also specialized forums for Malware Removal such as those listed below, where you might be able to get more help:
* Bleeping Computer Forums - http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/
* Spyware Warrior Forums - http://www.spywarewarrior.com/index.php
* SWI Forums - http://www.spywareinfoforum.com/
Check and tell if its working.