“I have to use them or Firefox gets really bogged down and memory& CPU use goes through the roof as seen on windows task manager.”
indeed. but i found ghostery and flashblock broke too many websites, so i use adblock plus and set the flash plugin to always ask to be activated. i almost never have to activate flash except occasionally to view a vid clip. Even that does break a few websites that were stupid enough to be programmed almost entirely in flash. nonetheless,setting flash for manual activation made a gigantic improvement in firefox performance.
I am going to give your way a try on firefox (adblock plus and set the flash plugin to always ask to be activated)