Firefox weirdness

[tvodrd]

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

 

[Marduke]

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

 

[tvodrd]

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

Larry

 

[Marduke]

Sounds like an auto-refresh

 

[tvodrd]

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

Larry

 

[Radio]

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

 

[Marduke]

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

 

[tvodrd]

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

Larry

 

[PhotonWrangler]

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.

 

[Empath]

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.

 

[tvodrd]

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

 

[Radio]

:thumbsup:

 

[LuxLuthor]

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.

Nice util. Thanks

 

[tvodrd]

What Lux said!

Larry