The Mystery of Multiple Opening of Firefox Windows

Dear folks,

It's only Week 1 of 2015 and since Monday I have been slowly going insane. I use Firefox browser and on Monday, it started going mad. There were two problems. The first one. Typing any url on the address bar doesn't work. I couldn't navigate to any site at all. When I typed in a search on Google, the behaviour of the search history was weird. I tried using the search function on my computer data and the same weird behaviour. The second problem. Multiple copies of my Firefox kept opening by itself. Non-stop. I couldn't close them fast enough.

I tried every other web browser I have - Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Chrome. All of them gave the same problem.

The first thing that came to mind was I have a virus. Fortunately, I have another pc I can use. I downloaded a few virus scanner - Anti-malware, adwcleaner, Junkware removal tool and a rootkit removal utility. I ran these programs. Yep - lots of so-called virus on my pc. But I couldn't see any real malicious virus. Just lots of cookies. Running the scan took ages. After I had done all the scanning, I would re-install Firefox to test. I did this over and over again, each time doing more - even going down to opening Firefox in safe mode, disabling all the add-ons, going to the registry to manually remove unnecessary files, running a few of the virus scanning in safe mode. I also tried restoring the pc to a previous timestamp. Each restoration took a long, long time. Each time it looked hopeful but during the reboot I would be informed it was unsuccessful as well. And I tried this experiment a few times, thinking a different timestamp would yield a success.

Nothing worked. No matter what I did, the thousands of Firefox windows kept opening. And opening.

On Wednesday, I told hubs I was giving up. It was too depressing and stressful. I was very reluctant to give up my computer because it has Windows 7 and my other pc uses Windows 8 which I dislike tremendously. Also, all my programs are installed on this computer. On Wednesday night, before I went to sleep, I decided to do one last thing. I re-indexed all the files on my computer. I thought that might help with problem one - which is the search function was off. Indexing took a very long time so I left the computer running and went to sleep.

This morning, I tried the seach function on my computer and it worked! I could search properly again. I wanted to wake hubs but thought I had better re-install Firefox to see if it worked. And it did. I was able to type in a url and navigate to the correct site. I was so happy I wanted to scream and shout. And then it happened. The hundreds of Firefox windows started popping up. Like crazy. I tried to close them all but they kept coming at top speed. It was so frightening. I was so desperate that I removed the battery in my wireless keyboard. To my amazement, the Firefox windows stopped popping up.

So the problem was in the freaking keyboard. I had previously told hubs this was a possiblity but we forgot to buy a new keyboard to test it out. My god. We could have saved ourselves so much headache. Today we bought a new non-wireless keyboard (play safe) and yep, the Firefox windows no longer pop up mindlessly. I can stop feeling so tensed now. And maybe get on with some real work like write a bag pattern.

I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. It's gonna be a bright (bright) bright (bright) sunshine' day. It's gonna be a bright (bright) bright (bright) sunshine' day. - Johnny Nash