Congrats on figuring it out and sharing the tips! When I get adventurous I'll have to give version 3 another try on my "seasoned" laptop.
I hope you have good luck when you try it. I lost my bookmarks though. I had them saved to desktop, but accidentally deleted them. Oh well. I had too many bookmarks that needed deleted anyway. P.S. I forgot to add that I also uninstalled flash before uninstalling Firefox, and reinstalled it afterwards. Don't know if that made a difference.
I'm surprised you've never heard of this problem before... It was described by CFerret in this feedback thread: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=136217 and more specifically by myself and illiquid in this feedback thread: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=135094 It was solved for me when I reinstalled my operating system, and it hasn't occurred since.
Sorry, I didn't see those threads. I'm glad I did not have to reinstall my OS in order to fix it. Just uninstalled firefox and flash along with every firefox reference in the registry - and reinstalled, and voila! That fixed it.