Very slow firefox startup

Question

hello,
I had had the problem that Firefox took much time (a minute or so) to start up. I followed the advice [http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/07/workaround-for-firefox-3-5-slow-startups-on-windows/ in this article] (which suggests clenaing history and temporary folders), but it didn't help. There were also various other problems, such as Firefox not running smoothly, update failures, weird error messages involving locked files and WinSXS (?!).
But then I noticed that under Add-Ons, there were several "Java Console" versions installed (Java Console 6.0.21, 6.0.20, 6.0.19 and so on). I uninstalled all but the latest one and it seems to have gotten much better now. Also, I uninstalled (actually, disabled, because it didn't let itself be uninstalled) that dotNet stuff.
tl;dr: as I cannot judge whether it is only me, whether others have this problem, whether Java Console even had anything to do with it, would someone more knowledgeable than myself please bring this to the attention of whomever it may concern (developers, knowledge base authors, who ever) if s/he thinks that Java Console (or, more accurately, the strange update process which leaves several versions installed alongside one another) may indeed be the culprit. But at any rate, it seems that uninstalling all but the latest version did the trick for me and Firefox now starts in a jiffy:)
Regards,

Answer 1

Open your firewall program. Make sure that it's set to tell you when an
application tries to access the web. Then check out the list of programs
the firewall knows about. Make sure that all programs you want to access
the web are set to '''Allow''', not '''Auto'''. Auto may not allow access.