I don't believe there are many Nightly users coming to this forum, you might be better off posting where the Nightly users hang out - MozillaZine Builds forum.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23
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Did you try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox?

• Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes

Fox works, other things are sporadic.

I'm thinking heat/loose connection around the RAM.

Fox is set to USE hardware accel.

Three things in various combinations seem to revive stuck stuff in windows explorer IE and Chrome (all the other stuff just works).

1. The mouse cursor has an image whose meaning is a mystery to me but it looks like an oval with up/down arrows; it is related to a fast scroll; starting this bug or feature as the case may be unsticks things. 2. rarely escape alone will do it 3. Ctrl-Alt-Del (not task mgr, just the call to it) unsticks many things.

Also often if I use a keyboard option, such as Ctrl-1,2,etc to tab change in Chrome, once done once, the mouse works and works to select, not to do something else.

As Windows Explorer itself is where it starts, and as similar things happen in Linux Ubuntu 12.04, unless its a Master Boot Record sort of rootkit, I'm almost certain its hardware and heat related as well.

That STILL leaves me wondering what firefox does to NOT be affected, as that would help pinpoint the ultimate cause of all this.

Thanks for the tip!

Try to boot the computer in Windows Safe Mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

nightly has the solution not the problem; maybe you are right.

I used to have firefox AND nightly but it seems lately installing one more or less removes the other...I will check over there, thanks.

safe mode is the same