Computers, bloody computers: Firefox and js3250.dll

Next to "Cathy Baker", the search term mentioned in the previous post, the biggest source of Google search hits for my site has been "js3250.dll". This little file has been the source of many Firefox problems for me in the past. Whenever Firefox refuses to open, js3250.dll is indicated as the responsible party. (I don't know if this is related to my current Firefox problems in which Firefox simply freezes up in the middle of a session. I'm now using Firefox only to check the RSS feeds coming from my friends' sites for new posts - which I will then open in Internet Explorer.)

Unfortunately I don't have much to offer on this, except a series of posts complaining about the lack of official Firefox information on this problem, and metaposts like this one. This problem is nebulous enough that it doesn't warrant its own label, and is just lumped under the "Computers bloody computers" label.

You would think with this many people being affected by a single problem, someone at Mozilla would look up and say "Hey, we should do something about this." But I guess they're just waiting for the open-source community to figure out a solution on their own.

If anyone does have anything more solid to offer than what I have posted on this blog, please leave a comment a fill the rest of us in. Thanks!

UPDATE, 1/5/2007: POSSIBLE ANSWER FOUND:
From the Mozillazine forums:

Kabli Posted: Dec Sat 9th 2006 5:19pm
This is usually is a malware that is deleting the js3250 file.
"Go to C:\Windows\System32\ipv6monl.dll and delete it. Reinstall Firefox and it will work fine."

If it was there you should do a full scan to see if there is other remaining malware. I use ewido (now by avg) http://www.ewido.net/


timothylee Posted: Dec Sat 9th 2006 9:35pm
dickvl: yes, the actualy file is deleted

Kabli- THANKS! it works fine now!


khanjrx Posted: Jan Wed 3rd 2007 8:37pm
Kabli wrote:
This is usually is a malware that is deleting the js3250 file.
"Go to C:\Windows\System32\ipv6monl.dll and delete it. Reinstall Firefox and it will work fine."

If it was there you should do a full scan to see if there is other remaining malware. I use ewido (now by avg) http://www.ewido.net/
Hi. I'm new here and I just have a question.

In relation to the malware file mentioned above, I found one on my computer that has a similar file name: "ipv6mon.dll". Although mine's missing that extra "l", is it considered to be malware also? Because I know it's possible that it might be different for everyone.


Guest Posted: Jan Wed 3rd 2007 8:53pm
There is a legit file that is ipv6mon.dll . Malware often does this, that is, using a name that is similar to a real one.

So. Maybe this is the answer to the js3250.dll problem that is frustrating Firefox users everywhere? Let's hope so!


UPDATE, 7/2/2008: Judging by my recent traffic, it looks like the recent release of Firefox 3 has not corrected this problem. Mozilla, what are you waiting for? Some user to solve this problem for you? Oh, wait, that's right...


UPDATE, 8/2/2008: Check out this (unfortunately anonymous) comment from this post:

Hi... I starting having Firefox 2.0.0.16 constantly saying it had to close - the culprit being js3250.dll. After trying the different methods here and quite a few other sites too and being unsuccessful fixing the crashes, I figured it was Javascript related - so I uninstalled all 4(!) versions of Java(TM) 6 Update 4,5,6, and 7... then reinstalled just Java(TM) 6 Update 7... and voila!... Firefox now working like a dream!... cheers :)

...and this follow-up:

Hi again... Oops, forgot to mention I then uninstalled Firefox via Ad and Remove programs, then reinstalled same Ffox version... and I didn't even have to reload all my addons, bookmarks, etc, etc with Feebe, as I thought I would have to... phew :)

Firefox and the js3250.dll crash

UPDATE, 1/6/2007: A POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM HAS BEEN POSTED!
See the bottom of this post for details!

So it's not just me. I finally decided to check out the "Details" information that comes up when Firefox crashes, and I keep seeing the same thing being referenced: js3250.dll.

A Google search for js3250.dll shows that this is a common cause of crashes for Firefox users. The symptoms tend to be the same: one day things are running moderately well, the next Firefox crashes, again and again, and eventually refuses to start up.

Help for Firefox is not easy to get. As the great open-source browser, Firefox is really intended for computer Do-It-Yourselfers, propellerhead shade-tree mechanics whose idea of a fun evening involves a lot of time scouring code looking for conflicts. I'm not one of them. I'm a user of technology, not a tinkerer.

Firefox help forums are of limited utility, too. They're basically places where users go and complain about their problems, and Firefox Evangelists drift by and offer solutions. There's a cult-like air to these places that I've noticed elsewhere in the Firefox world: any criticism of Firefox is seen as trolling, and may be grounds for getting tossed out to a place where you shall wail and gnash your teeth. Also, help topics that specifically mention js3250.dll suddenly don't mention it once you click on them. What gives?

The offered solutions that I found scattered around the Mozilla/Firefox site remind me of the time I tried to resolve an issue with Norton SystemWorks, when it decided to take a very aggressive approach to system protection by preventing any files from the Internet from loading onto my computer. I eventually decided to uninstall it from my computer...which required printing out about 200 pages of instructions that absolutely had to be followed in exact order or else my computer might stop functioning entirely.

So. Maybe when I have a lot of free time on my hands and absolutely nothing else to do I'll start to go through the pages and pages of hypertext-linked instructions and see if I can resolve this issue without melting my PC. Until then, I guess I'll be rediscovering the joys of Internet Explorer.

See also: Computers, bloody computers: Firefox and js3250.dll

Just when you thought it was safe to start using Firefox again...

I haven't used Firefox in over two years. I got tired of the crashes and failures, the uninstalls and reinstalls, all apparently related to a file called js3250.dll.

I don't miss it that much. Microsoft learned a lot from its upstart competitor and emulated some of its major features, like tabbed browsing. Through Google Reader and "following" on Blogger I've been able to get the same results as Firefox's "live bookmarks."

Still, every once in a while I will come across a site that sings the praises of Firefox, and tells you that it has been optimized for Firefox. And I wonder what I am missing.

My posts about the js3250.dll bug have been some of my most consistent hit generators since I first put them up. But lately - say, in the last few months - the number of hits from people searching specifically for js3250.dll has died off. Has the problem gone away?

Apparently not. Almost all of the increase in traffic in the last week of October can be traced to a single link on the Tech Support Guy forums - a link that was first posted on April 14, 2007.

So what's going on here? I wish I knew. Did Firefox make this problem go away for a while, only to have it come back with a vengeance? Who can say?

All I know for sure is, I won't be reinstalling Firefox anytime soon.

Another Monkey's Greatest Hits, Volume 2

Volume 1 of this list (from nearly four years ago!) was mostly a list of things that I considered my best posts. This will be a much shorter list of the things that have perennially attracted the most traffic and generated the most comments.

It's hard to pick a top hit generator, but I'm pretty sure this is it:
Another Monkey: Computers, bloody computers: Firefox and js3250.dll
I find this somewhat upsetting. This was a post from two years ago about a persistent bug that led me to finally stop using Firfox altogether. Now, before all you Firefox partisans start telling me about how Firefox is the greatest thing ever, and Internet Explorer sucks, and how you've never even heard of the js3250.dll bug, I'll just say: don't bother. This post is responsible for ten of my last hundred hits, and it's been around there since I first posted it. Obviously, this problem is still out there, even if you haven't encountered it personally. I haven't had a problem with it, because I am quite happily running IE8 on Windows XP. No crashes, no need to reinstall my browser every few days.

Another major hit and comment generator continues to be The Strange Case of the Headless Rabbit. This post has become one of the global repositories for information from people who have found decapitated rabbits in their yards. It is so popular that I often tell people that if they can't remember to find me by Googling "Another Monkey", they can just Google the more memorable "headless rabbit."

A lot of people seen to be looking for information on The Poop Cake. Though some are actually looking for a "poop shaped cake." Sorry, can't help you there.

An awful lot of people are looking for information of the Police Protective Fund. I'm glad I can help them.

Police Protective Fund: Scam, Fraud, or just bad people?

Finally, as was the case four years ago, people always want to know about Cathy Baker from Hee Haw.
Cathy Baker, Hee Haw, and how they relate to the Hubble Space Telescope and other endangered species
Sadly, a lot of people seem to believe that she is dead. I suppose eventually they'll be right.

Firefox sucks (again)

I've been using Firefox again for the last few weeks. It seemed to be much more stable than it was a few months ago when I abandoned it during the rash of js3250.dll crashes. Unfortunately "firefox js3250.dll" and "firefox keeps crashing" continue to be among the top ten search engine hits for my site. So obviously the problem hasn't gone away.

As I said, Firefox has been much more stable and reliable for me than it was a few months ago. At least this was true until last night. Last night the latest "critical update" for Firefox installed itself on my computer. Since then each of my Firefox sessions has ended in a lockup and a crash. Most of the time this is just annoying. When the crash takes out a blog entry I've just invested some time in, and when the crash is so serious that the blog entry is unrecoverable, it's more than annoying.

So. Maybe I'll keep using Firefox to check for blog updates using the RSS feed. Maybe I'll even use it for other purposes. But for now, it's just not stable or reliable enough to use to post blog entries.

I suppose I could recreate the blog entry I was working on. It was link-heavy and topical and funny. Maybe I'll wait until tomorrow. And I'll definitely be writing it using Internet Explorer, not Firefox. For all its problems, IE is proving itself to be more trustworthy that Firefox. Oh, well.

Get well soon, Firefox.

Harry Potter and the Brief Readership Spike

A few weeks ago - March 1, 2010, to be exact - the band OK Go! released the "Rube Goldberg machine" version of the video for their song "This Too Shall Pass." It's a remarkable piece of video, and instantly went viral. Half a dozen of my Facebook friends immediately posted it, one with the comment "WATCHITWATCHITWATCHITWATCHIT". (I have learned to trust her musical tastes, so I did.) Within hours, almost everyone was watching it. Within days, almost everyone had watched it. And within a week, anyone who brought it up was essentially told, "Oh, that's so last week."

The day before yesterday I noticed a spike in the readership of my blog, Another Monkey. I expected this would be another Cathy Baker spike, or another mass outbreak of headless rabbit discoveries, or another group of people desperately seeking the solution to Facebook's js3250.dll bug. But it wasn't any of these things. Instead the entry that was attracting all the attention was this one:

Another Monkey: Harry Potter and the Schizotypal Personality Disorder

I looked it up and anxiously began re-reading it to see what kind of dumbassed comments I had made in that post. And what I found was...pretty good. Well-researched, occasionally even beyond the Wikipedia level. Pretty well written, too. Well, this was during those months when I was laid off; I really didn't have any excuse for not writing, and for not writing well.

But who were these people? My SiteMeter told me that the traffic was coming from Facebook, but that was where the information ended. Was this a Facebook group for Harry Potter fans? A Facebook Schizotypal Personality Disorder support group? A Facebook group for Psychologists? I had no idea. A single anonymous comment didn't help. Looking deeper into SiteMeter showed that someone had originally discovered the post while Googling "harry potter and personality disorders" or something like that - the exact wording is now lost to the aether. Soon there was another search engine hit for a slightly different wording of the same search. And then the flood of Facebook hits started coming.

It has subsided.

Maybe I'll never know who these people were or who directed them to my post. Maybe a few of them liked what they saw and decided to stick around or come back for more. Maybe one of them will read this post and fill me in. I don't know.

I don't know how OK Go! is doing. I had heard a Morning Edition report on them a few weeks before the video came out, about conflicts they had had with their record company (EMI) over allowing fans to embed the video of "Here It Goes Again" - the "treadmills" video that came to be a prime example of the "viral video." Another report released shortly after the "This Too Shall Pass" video hit the Internet indicated that the band had broken with their label and started one of their own - a risky venture in the best of times. I suppose I could glean some information from the band's website.

But going viral isn't what it used to be. What used to happen over the span of weeks or months has now been reduced to days or hours. Any fame is fleeting. Like the song says, "This Too Shall Pass."

I'm now a published author!

...sort of. You know, not counting this blog, Another Monkey, which is read by dozens (even scores) of people every day in many parts of the world, mostly people wondering "What ever happened to Cathy Baker from Hee Haw?", "What is the js3250.dll and why did it just make Firefox crash?", and "Why is there a headless rabbit in my yard?"*

Pick up a copy of the June 2010 issue of Smithsonian magazine. Turn to page 15. There, in the upper left-hand corner, is a comment from yr. hmbl. blogger, dazzlingly positioned right above the spine and skull of a dinosaur!

Yep, pretty much just like this.

I was advised of this a while back via e-mail:

I am writing in regards to a recent comment you left on the Dinosaur Tracking blog on Smithsonian.com:

I've always wondered what kind of conclusion might be drawn by future (perhaps non-human) paleontologists who unearth the remains of a museum and find skeletons of many species of dinosaurs gathered there. Perhaps the dinosaurs lived in these buildings, or worked there? Finding that they apparently crewed seagoing vessels will confuse matters even more.
- April 13, 2010
(http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2010/04/13/the-dinosaur-casualties-of-world-war-i/)

We enjoyed your comment and will be publishing it in the print version of our magazine. We have a page in the print version of the magazine called Your Smithsonian that spotlights the best user-generated content on our Web site. Your comment will appear on that page in the June issue of the magazine.

Go out and get a copy of the June 2010 Smithsonian magazine and see for yourself!


*Actually, a quick check of my current entry page ranking shows that twenty of the last hundred visitors entered through the main page. Only five came because of the Firefox bug, five for information on headless rabbits, and three in search of information on Cathy Baker.

Time to take down the yard signs

It was a long, hard race to Election Day. Even as the results came in Tuesday night, even as Pennsylvania was called for Obama barely five minutes after the polls had closed (with only 1% of precincts reporting), even as every probable path to victory for McCain and Palin slammed shut as state after state went for Obama and Biden, I still refused to consider the race over. Not until I heard that McCain had called Obama to congratulate him on his victory. Not until McCain gave his concession speech. Not until Obama gave his victory speech.

When I was seven we got our first dog. It was a puppy from a pet store, back before we ever put any thought into the ethics of such a thing. He was a cute tiny Chihuahua, a teeny tiny thing. We kept him in a box in our kitchen that first night, with a blanket and some food and some water.

In the middle of the night I went out to look at him. I couldn't believe it. We had a puppy. We have a puppy. I was so happy, I had to just keep looking at him and reminding myself that this was for real, this wasn't some dream that was going to fade away within minutes of waking.

President-Elect Barack Obama isn't a Chihuahua puppy from a pet store who is being kept in a box in my kitchen. But the feeling of overjoyed disbelief is very similar.

*************************************************************

For the last eight weeks I have dedicated large patches of virtual real estate on this blog to my Obama virtual yard signs. I don't know if they changed anyone's vote, or encouraged anyone to vote who might not have otherwise. Maybe they gave an incremental nudge to people who came here searching for "cathy baker hee haw" or "js3250.dll" or "headless rabbit." I don't know. Barack Obama won the election, and I did my part to help him.

In less than 74 days President-Elect Obama will be sworn in as President Obama. And then the work will begin of fixing this great nation of ours, of undoing the damage that has been done in the last eight years and taking us forward into a better world.

But that better world won't be created through the actions of fawning sycophants or overeager cheerleaders. There will be hard work. There will be dissent. There will be conflicts.

So it's time to take down the signs. I won't throw them away, or hide them. I'll put them here as a reminder of the long fight that was just fought.







But with these signs coming down, I made a new one to remind us of the battle we fought, and the victory we achieved. If you played any role whatsoever in this victory, feel free to copy it for your own use:

Yes we DID!



YouTube weekend video: Barenaked Ladies, "Pinch Me:"

50,000

Sometime today I had my 50,000th visitor. Who it was, exactly, I cannot say - by the time I checked the SiteMeter it was at 50,102, with 141 visitors so far for the day. Unfortunately, SiteMeter only retains rudimentary information on the last 100 visitors to the site, so the information that would have allowed me to take a guess at the visitor's identity has been lost.

So, this goes out to every last one of you, whether you're a regular reader or a first time visitor, whether you've known me for decades or have only come here because you were searching for "two moons on august 27" or "js3250.dll" or "cathy baker hee haw": THANK YOU! Thank you for visiting, thank you for reading. Without you I'd just be sitting here talking to myself on this site. And how crazy would THAT be?

Tomorrow is the last day of my second rotation. I need to go to bed soon. I'll write lots more on my four days off, I promise!

Attractive ghouls

I ended another rotation of work this morning. I came home by way of the Krispy Kreme in Scranton and picked up a late Mother's Day gift for my mom. I then did a bit of a tour of downtown Scranton while trying to get back to the highway, and drove past what I have always imagined to be the site of The Office's Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company - 600 Linden Street. (It actually houses offices for several Certified Public Accountants.) Got home, and after dealing with a surprisingly powerful nosebleed (no idea where that came from) got to work weedwhacking at about 7:45 in the morning. After a bit of time trying to catch up on Facebook and my list of daily blog reads, I went to bed and slept like I was dead for a solid six hours.

After waking, eating, and showering, it was time to take my mom grocery shopping one last time until late June, unless I am laid off for any of the intervening Tuesdays. By the time we wrapped things up the drizzle had turned into a pouring rain, which made bringing the groceries back into the house that much more fun.

I fired up the computer and went online. After scanning my inbox, checking Facebook updates and reviewing any new blog posts, I decided to do something I haven't done in a while: check my Sitemeter page ranking to see what was leading people to my blog, at least for the last 100 visits.

I'm always glad to see visitors coming in by way of the main page, because this usually means that there was some intentionality to their visit - they weren't just arriving because they were following a link to a specific post, or coming by way of a search engine, but were just coming to my blog. Twelve out of the most recent hundred were like that.

The next three most popular entry pages weren't a surprise. Eleven visitors for Cathy Baker and/or Hee Haw, six for The Strange Case of the Headless Rabbit, four for the perennial Firefox js3250.dll glitch. And in the fifth position* was this post:

Another Monkey: Pareidolia: Ghouls in the Carina Nebula

Why? I went though the details of Sitemeter to find out.

The earliest visit was #176,449 and was from Bourges, France at 8:26 this morning. It came in on an image search. The image was this one, the first one in the post.

The next visit was #176,464 from Stevens Point, Wisconsin at 12:15 this afternoon. It was also an image search, for the same image as the previous one.

Then there came visit #176,470 from Adelphia, Italy at 1:13 P.M. Image search, same image. Hmmm...

The fourth and, so far, final visit to this post was #176,484 from Clermont, Florida at 4:10 PM. This time the search was not an image search, but a text search that was worded in a way that would be more appropriate for an Artificial Intelligence search engine than a text/image-based search engine like Google. The search was "do any one see a face in the carina nebula" - and I guess the answer, based on the results of this search, is "yes, quite a few people!"



*Actually this is a four-way tie with the Firefox entry, this one on Marcellus Shale, and for some reason the January 2009 archive page.

Pre-change changes

When I eventually switch over to a new template (to take advantage of all the new features of the new Blogger) I will have to re-do all of my customizations. No big deal for me, sonce my customizations are mostly just on my sidebar. But my sidebar was in need of a little maintenance. So the question is: update the sidebar now, or change it after I change the template? I decided to update now.

Her's a list of the changes:
- Camilla's old moblog site is gone. Long live Camilla's NEW moblog!
- Camilla has begun posting videos and songs to YouTube. For my own convenience, I've added a link. Check out her version of "Me and a Gun"!
- Marisa moved her Cheatham County Rock Star's Wife site over to Blogger a long, long time ago. I'm just getting around to linking it, and I've also kept the old site.
- I finally added Lauren's new site, Sundays Off. So now she has three sites on the sidebar!

UPDATE: I've also added Tiffany's If I Were Queen of the World. I found her by way of Ashley's site - more specifically, her SiteMeter. Tiffany was also promoting "De-Lurker Week", a week in which bloggers would encourage visitors who normally don't comment to comment. I didn't do this, because I think I mostly would have gotten comments like "I'm glad I'm not the only one having problems with js3250.dll on Firefox!" and "Hey, thanks for the links on Cathy Baker of Hee Haw, but where are the topless pictures of her?" (As far as I know, there aren't any. Sadly.) Tiffany's writing, what little I've read of it, is great fun, occasionally gut-wrenching, and is at least as far-ranging as my own blog. So, go visit Tiffany's site, and leave a comment for her - don't be a lurker!

A few sites have moved into the "Blogs on hiatus" category. Remember, this just means "These people haven't posted in a long time, I hope they're not dead." There are at least two other blogs that could be moved into here based on non-posting, but I'm in frequent contact with these bloggers and I hope they will post again soon.

A few more have been added to the "Gone but not forgotten" category. These blogs no longer appear to exist. This is always a sad situation, and I keep the links in the hope that they will come back someday.

One special category is Issy Reyes' site. She switched over to a different site (her third since I've been linking her) some time ago. But the new site no longer seems to exist, while the old (second) site is still around. So I've left the link in place, hoping to find her again. We've been in touch off and on for something like ten years, and I hope to keep in touch!

Is it fixed?

I struggled with the mozillaZine instructions for the "Standard Diagnostic" for Firefox last night and did not achieve any noticeable results, other than to cause the crash to sometimes happen in "module(UNKNOWN)" instead of in js3250.dll. But after a few hours of down-time and a reboot, Firefox started up on the first try this morning, and has not crashed in a half hour of use and a dozen pages visited.

Firefox has a lot of nice features that I really missed yesterday. I don't think I'm going to abandon it right away. Still, I wish they would drop the "Firefox is wonderful!" attitude and adopt a "Firefox is imperfect, here are the known problems and solutions" stance.

So. Yesterday. Some international chatting, more porch-painting, walked up the hill to church, walked back down the hill after church, mowed the lawn (new house), whacked the weeds (new house), tinkered with the computer, watched some of the Hee Haw marathon, made a late-night phone call. Late night phone calls are fun because if I am sufficiently tired I will begin to experience hypnagogic hallucinations. "...but what about the big green snake on the right, the hognosed one with its mouth open? Errr....."

Oh. My hits have exploded again. "Cathy Baker Hee Haw" stuff. (To the person who searched on "Camilla Hee Haw", I believe the woman's name was "Gunilla". But it sounded like "Camilla" to me.) If that woman is ever strapped for cash, she can sell autographed photos for $5 apiece and become an instant millionaire!

Firefox keeps crashing!

Note: This post is just superficial bitching about Firefox issues. For more in-depth bitching and some links, go to these posts:
Firefox and the js3250.dll crash
Is it fixed?
The answer to the previous post's title is "NO!"
UPDATE, 1/6/2007: A POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM HAS BEEN POSTED!
See the bottom of this post for details!

Firefox keeps crashing on me! When I first downloaded it back in January 2005 Firefox was supposed to be infinitely better than Internet Explorer, and much more crash-resistant. Sadly, that is not the case. Maybe it's just the usual heat-related problems with my PC (although the room temperature is still below 78), maybe it's the increasingly complicated moving adds that infest most websites and kill my PC's performance.
Meanwhile, Firefox says that I have all the latest updates, so it's not that

But whatever the cause, the symptom is that Firefox is collapsing faster than George H.W. Bush at a state dinner with the Japanese Prime Minister! Grrr!

SiteMeter issues

A few days ago I started having problems with Internet Explorer 8.*  Big problems.  It would lock up at various times in a non-repeatable manner.  Sometimes it would lock up when I opened too many tabs.  Sometimes it would lock up when I tried to close a tab.  Sometimes it would lock up if I was typing a comment in Facebook and made a mistake or wanted to make a change and used the left-arrow key. Sometimes, but not always.

I tried everything.  I remember once I started having random problems that seemed to be related to my mouse - more specifically, my mouse cord - and finally tracked the source to my drawing pad pen, velcroed to the side of my tower. Once I removed that, the problems went away. (Spurious signals being induced in the mouse wire by the magnet present in the tip of the pen? I have no idea.) I looked for something similar. I have a pair of headphones hanging from a stick-on hook on my tower. Could the magnets in the earpieces be causing a problem? I took them down. I had pulled my now-expired passport out of my passport pouch and propped it against the side of the computer. Could there be a magnetic strip embedded in the cover? I moved that. The problems persisted. I finally tried running an anti-virus scan and I found - something. Mal/GlFlframe-A. Not a virus, but an object that exhibits virus-like properties. Something that hadn't been there on the previous day's sweep. I removed it.

The problems persisted.

This had graduated from being annoying to something much worse.  It wasn't something physical, it wasn't something extrinsic like a virus.  Was it something intrinsic to one of the sites I had open?  My habit is to open my Hotmail, then Facebook, then SiteMeter, then Blogger. From Hotmail I may open links in new tabs.  Ditto for Facebook.  From SiteMeter I may open detailed information about individual visits in new tabs, and sometimes use those as jumping-off points to sites that directed traffic to my blog. From Blogger I will open my blog, and check for updates on friends' blogs.  Within a minute of going online I may have a dozen or more new tabs open.  Could one of them be causing the problem?

I tried opening each of my first four sites in separate windows.  I thought maybe these would each invoke individual sessions of IE8, and a crash on one would not cause a crash in the others.  In a few minutes I found I was wrong.

OK.  Four sites.  Open them three at a time.  There are four ways of doing this, assuming the order in which I open them is irrelevant.  (If it is relevant, there are 4x3x2 ways of choosing three items from a group of four, so I would have to run twenty-four tests.)  On a hunch I decided to eliminate the third site first: SiteMeter.

This wasn't just a random choice.  SiteMeter, once opened, is a static site - it won't update unless I refresh it.  All it does is show me reports. But the SiteMeter homepage was once apparently infected with a virus.  This came in the immediate aftermath of the August 2008 incident in which SiteMeter managed to crash most of the Internet for the better part of a weekend, apparently because someone decided that a Friday night would be the best time to implement some changes that had not yet been tested. (Perhaps the virus was a parting gift from the employee who was blamed for the problem?)

(This was not the only disaster of 2008 for SiteMeter.  They rolled out the new, exciting, revised SiteMeter in mid-September, to universal condemnation - and rolled it back, to their credit, the same day.  I don't know how much these two fiascoes hurt the company, but I'm guessing "a lot."  Since that time they have made occasional posts to their news and announcements blog, but most of them have been removed.  The last post there is from February 19, 2009 - more than two years ago at the time of this writing.)

So I opened Hotmail, then Facebook, then Blogger.  It took an enormous effort not to open SiteMeter.  And then I surfed and clicked and commented away to my heart's content without so much as a hiccup.  I soon forgot I was running a test.  Eventually I remembered.  I finished off any business I had, closed any extraneous tabs, and opened SiteMeter.

Within a minute Internet Explorer locked up.

I shut down IE and re-ran my virus scan.  It came up clean.

I re-opened SiteMeter by itself.  Within a minute it locked up again.

OK, test over.  SiteMeter was to blame.  Not very scientific, but so far this conclusion is holding.

So what's wrong?

I have no idea.  I'm not seeing much scuttlebutt about SiteMeter online, other than  some speculation that the precipitous drop in Gawker Media readership after a site redesign might actually be a problem with how their SteMeter thingie is reporting visitor statistics.  But I don't see any other recent praise or criticism of SiteMeter.  And the SiteMeter site itself is remarkably comatose. It's possibly little more than a zombie at this point, a zombie that happens to be generating enough revenue to keep it running.

I still check SiteMeter, sometimes.  Usually at the end of a session, when I'm done with everything else, when I don't care if IE crashes or not.  But it does.  Every damned time.



*Yes, I know.  Well, there's your problem right there.  Blah blah blah.  Shut up.  Has anyone resolved the Firefox js3250.dll issue yet?  I still get lots of hits about that every day.  SiteMeter tells me that.