firefox causes Ubuntu to run very slowly

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Binary package hint: firefox-3.5

Anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days after a system restart, Firefox/Xorg suck up most of the available CPU time (as reported by top), even when there's no indication of pages loading or scripts running. Moreover, it seriously impacts other applications, e.g, wireshark will take 2 minutes to load a pcap file that normally loads in about 5 seconds. Killing firefox does not resolve the problem nor does a "restart"; however a shutdown and restart will clear it. Anecdotally, it would appear the problem is triggered by a temporary period of poor or no connectivity to the net (i.e., dropped pings or ping times 5-10 seconds).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Jul 19 08:35:30 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: firefox-3.5 3.5.9+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-22.60-generic
SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-22-generic i686