[srb]

If you Disable an Add-on it remains disabled until you manually Enable it.

I have seen machines not respond to the F8 key if it is pressed prematurely or too often.  If you have a visible BIOS screen you can wait until you see the hard drives start to be recognized and then you don't need to press it more than once per second.

If for some reason you just can't get it to go to the boot menu, you should be able to force it to automatically enter the boot menu by improperly shutting down with the power button (after of course closing any programs where data loss may occur).

I prefer Firefox (and that's my default) due to its superior library of add-ons and speed over IE, but there are some websites that only work with Internet Explorer.  Two of my favorite add-ons are PlainOldFavorites, which allows Firefox to share favorites with IE, and Open in IE (as well as "Open in Chrome") that loads the current page into those browsers.

Other Add-ons that make life easy or fun:

TBgoto - buttons to go to the Top or Bottom of webpage
Zoom Page - remembers zoom levels for a webpage plus customizable zoom increments
Copy Plain Text - copies text to paste while stripping out formatting
TinEye Reverse Image Search - right-click on an image to search instances on the web
FireFTP - great FTP file transfer program

Steve

[Doublej]

Upon further reflection I remember a friend of mine that had a similar problem. In his case it was caused by Kaspersky Antivirus. You can try turning off your antivirus software temporarily and see if the problem goes away.

[Don_S]

I hate to jinx a good day but maybe somebody can make sense out of this.  Last night I had the normal frequent problems.  Spybot and MalwareBytes run in normal boot mode did not help.

Today I tried to boot in safe-mode. That is the only change since last night.  I was pretty sure it did not work and I was not in safe mode. My tech elves here confirmed that.  All I did was pound the heck out of the F8 key. So far today I have been online 3.5 hours at all of my normal sites with only one freeze up.  That was a little while ago and spoiled my "no hitter".

OK, update just before I shut down.  Second freeze up in 4 hours.   Not bad compared to the last few days.

Make any sense at all?

[WGH]

Any other program causing freezes? It could be mechanical, like a dust clogged cpu cooler or bad ram or a power supply going bad. If not, then instead of wasting hours and hours trouble shooting just re-install W7. Probably take 1/2 an hour and everything is fixed.

Win7′s no-reformat, nondestructive reinstall by Fred Langa of Windows Secrets.

"Microsoft won’t tell you this, but you can do a fast, nondestructive, in-place, total reinstall of Windows 7 without damaging your user accounts, data, installed programs, or system drivers."

Wayne

[Doublej]

Two things. I think you have to hold the F8 down until it boots into safe mode. Tapping it is not going to help one bit.

Based on your new information I am going to go out on a limb and say that your machine does not possess any malware or other nasties but you may have a hardware issue with the device or a problem with your ISP connection.

Do you have a desktop or laptop? Are you using a wireless or wired connection?