Firefox weirdness

Every 3 minutes like clockwork, the Zone Alarm Pro task bar icon shows activity for approximately 1 second. This is accompanied by a CPU usage spike that sometimes causes my cursor to "hour glass." Stopwatch in hand and eyes glued to processes in Task Mgr, it seems to be Firefox! Who/what would Firefox need to call every 3 minutes? I turned off automatic search for updates in Firefox/restarted but the activity continues. Have I become somebody's bot? (XP/cable modem/NOD 32 AV)

Larry

Are you often viewing the same website? Drudge Report, for example, does a frequent page refresh, whether you like it or not.

Happens here! I can look at a page for 3 minutes without clicking anything and bingo.

Larry

Sounds like an auto-refresh

Firefox doesn't have an auto refresh feature, and clicking refresh has obvious effects, even if the page hasn't changed.

Larry

Have you installed the FF FTP client? It has a known 3 minute bug.

I wasn't sure if you happened to have this extension installed.

Negative, Mark and Marduke. And thanks for trying to help!

Larry

One way to find out is to download and install Wireshark (formerly Ethereal), a free packet sniffer. Run a capture on your ethernet NIC port for 5-10 minutes while doing nothing else, then stop the capture and analyze. You'll be able to capture the traffic and see where it's going.

It wouldn't hurt to check your add-ons for Firefox. You could disable one at a time to see if it stops with any of them.

Wireshark installed and run for 10 minutes, and nada! Nothing on the Zonealarm icon either. The 3-minute traffic appears to have stopped! I even closed Firefox and reloaded.

Firefox add-ons are: No Script, Realplayer Browser Record Plug-in, Skype extension for Firefox, Talkback (to Mozilla), and TrackMeNot. That's all. btw, I turned off TrackMeNot about a week ago in case it was the culprit.

This is bizarre! I've been ignoring the 3-minute thing for a couple weeks, and curiosity got the better of me. If it returns, I'll sick Wireshark on it. It going away like that isn't helping my paranoia. :shrug:

Larry

:thumbsup:

PhotonWrangler said:

One way to find out is to download and install Wireshark (formerly Ethereal), a free packet sniffer. Run a capture on youru ethernet NIC port for 5-10 minutes while doing nothing else, then stop the capture and analyze. You'll be able to capture the traffic and see where it's going.

Click to expand...

Nice util. Thanks

What Lux said!

Larry