Firefox freezes Windows XP

[jamturtle]

Well this is a bit strange about 3-4 months ago I started having problems with zimbra web client on firefox. Basically what happens is that when it receives new mail the entire system freezes for about 1-5 minutes or worse if several emails are received. I have not worried about it till recently when a couple or users told me they were having similar problems. I am the sys admin for a small company and figured I had corrupted my account some how or firefox's profile. Luckily most of my users are on Thunderbird and only a few use the web client exclusively, so maybe its been happening all this time.
I did some tests and I am still stumped. Out of the 20 or so that use the web client regularly 3 are having this trouble [including my system]; incoming mail freezes system for 1-5 minutes, high activity on cpu, no response from system till firefox unfreezes. I have uninstalled firefox and reinstalled it, deleted profiles, ran firefox in safe mode, still the same. This problem looks like its isolated to a few systems because I have checked mail fine on a several Macs [10.4.11 and 10.5.6] and other XP systems and it works fine.
It seems like it might be an account problem because using a different account on the same problem system firefox works fine. Firefox also works fine if my account is accessed in standard mode so maybe its AJAX??
On the same machine my zimbra account works great on IE7, SeaMonkey and Chrome. I have also done a re-indexing of the account.
This has me a bit stumped has anyone seem anything like this or could advice what else to try or look for?

TIA

[dwmtractor]

You haven't mentioned what version of Zimbra you are running. Please post that.

I can say that I use Zimbra with Firefox 3.0.6 on XP all the time, and I have not observed this problem. I think I remember an issue (not exactly like this, but some weirdnesses) with one of the early versions of Firefox 3, so you might check that version too.

You might also have a look at /var/log/zimbra.log (tail the file to get recent activity) and see if there is anything there that might give us a hint what's going on.

Let us know what you find.

[jamturtle]

oops yes sorry I am using 5.0.12 Network Edition, but had observed problems with 5.0.10 and 5.0.9. Sorry I did not pay much attention to this because I thought it was just my system and I would just wipe it at some point. I currently use firefox 3.0.6, which I have re-installed a few times and blown away profiles. There maybe something else I need to blow away in a mozilla folder somewhere, but have not found it yet.
As I also mentioned I have tried it on other XP systems and my account on firefox works fine, there is no real delay or freezing when a new email is received. At first I thought maybe it was firefox's add-ons but even in safe mode I have the same problem. What blows me away is that using another account [like test] on the same firefox, same XP machine works fine. Also my account on the same XP system works fine in SeaMonkey, Chrome and IE7. Very strange. I will check out those logs as you suggest but that would be on the server side and I am not sure that is the problem but maybe some clues will be revealed.

TIA

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by jamturtle

What blows me away is that using another account [like test] on the same firefox, same XP machine works fine. Also my account on the same XP system works fine in SeaMonkey, Chrome and IE7. Very strange. I will check out those logs as you suggest but that would be on the server side and I am not sure that is the problem but maybe some clues will be revealed.

TIA

If it's account-specific, I'd almost bet there will be some clue in the logs.