Plugin-container and Flashplugin are both generating a million reads and writes an hour... even when Firefox is minimized and running no audio/video; how can I

Question

I am running FF 18.0.2 on a Win7 system with an i7 CPU and 8GB RAM. My Flash plugin is newly-updated. I've used Firefox on this machine its entire life (3 years).
Since 3 or 4 (?) versions ago, I've been getting massive activity on my hard drive with Firefox. When I check with Win Task Manager, I see the plugin-container.exe *32 and the FlashPlayerPlugin_11_5_502_149.exe *32 processes are generating millions of I/O reads and writes, even while Firefox is idle (minimized, running no audio or video). On this latest version, 18.0.2, the drive activity stalls out YouTube videos repeatedly, even though I can see they're buffered ahead. The playing video will stop, audio will continue to end of buffer, and then EVERYTHING stops (Firefox not responding) for 30 seconds or so. It will then pickup again and play until it repeats the same pattern in a minute or so.
Example: I closed and restarted Firefox 2 days ago. Earlier today I checked Windows Task Manager and found the two processes EACH generated about 161 million reads and 141 million writes since then! My wife's laptop is showing nothing like a hundredth of that.
The constant drive activity is slowing down all programs outside of Firefox too, as you might imagine. The PC is acting like it's a dedicated machine for Flash.

Answer 1

The Reset Firefox feature can fix many issues by restoring Firefox to its factory default state while saving your essential information.
Note: ''This will cause you to lose any Extensions, Open websites, and some Preferences.''
To Reset Firefox do the following:
#Go to Firefox > Help > Troubleshooting Information.
#Click the "Reset Firefox" button.
#Firefox will close and reset. After Firefox is done, it will show a window with the information that is imported. Click Finish.
#Firefox will open with all factory defaults applied.
Further information can be found in the [[Reset Firefox – easily fix most problems]] article.
Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!