[Maurice Tift]

   updates to her Windows 7 machine that has made it almost unuseable...

  A few months ago, I started seeing cases of computers hanging when Internet Explorer went to a site with any flash animations (like their MSN homepage). It would work OK if I ran IE with protected mode turned off. I finally found that the problem could be fixed by removing all Adobe software (flash, shockwave - probably didn't need to uninstall Reader), rebooting and then re-installing the software from the web (ninite.com).

[Texas Fossil]

Thanks, I will try that. It is somewhat useable (as per my wife) but I hate it.

I have installed Firefox on several of her other computers but not this one. It is less than 1 year old Dell.