Executing Firfox for the Top Bar Freezes the PC no mouse movement no keyboard response and Putty/ssh times out.
Requires a thump on the Reset switch to reboot and get going.

btw exeuting Firefox from the Applications menu does not present the same problem.
Any thoughts or experience to share will be appreciated

How and which firefox is executed in the two cases ?
Look at the properties.

Now I am unable to get Firefox to run from the top panel, the Internet menu or from a terminal session.

It loads firefox but when I move the mouse over on to the firefox window it freezes up. When it freezes, the keyboard locks with the Num Lock light on. Vista machine logged in via SSH/Putty losed connection. The Power button on the front of the PC is inoperative. The only thing left functioning is the Reset button

Did locate firefox and I see that it is firefox-3.0

thanks for your help

You could try to reinstall firefox, or update to the latest version.
If you run from terminal, what is the output at the moment of the freeze ?

Run from Terminal, FF brings up its screen and a small window asking whether to bring up a new screen or try to recover the oldI can click the NEW button and the pointer jumps to the firefox screen and freezes.
I marked all the firefox modules for reinstall in Synaptics and that seemed to work OK but results are the same.

What is the output in the terminal, any errors ?

Don't know. Firefox covers the Terminal and when it freezes the errors are lost at the reboot.

This isn't a particularly satisfying fix, but when all hell breaks loose with firefox, I generally start with a clean slate.

First, close firefox. Next:
Now launch it again and see if the issue is resolved.

If not, just perform the reverse of what you did above, and continue down the path you were on.

If so, note that all your plugins, bookmarks, etc. are now in ~/.mozilla.BAD. It may take some effort and patience to locate everything and get it moved.

By the way, if you want to capture terminal output, next time do:
Even if the screen freezes, you can later view "my-ff-output" for clues.

Thanks for the trick. That brought firefox up in a smaller screen which allowed me to see the error in the Terminal,
So, I moved mozilla to mozilla.bad
Opened terminal
executed FF which came up with a GnomeUI error on the terminal window
Firefox open to the upper left of the screen and on top of it was a window with an error and then another window asking to restore tabs or open new window?
Clicked on open new window and on the small firefox screen there was an error which read in part Error occurred whil loading a service or config info.
On the Terminal screen there was an error that said in part Gnome UI erroWhile Connecting to Session Manager,none of the authentication protocolsspecified are supported.

Moving mozilla to moailla.bad allowed me to see the error on the terminal screen which was GnomeUI While connecting to session managernone of the authentication protocols specified are supported

Just started trying other apps and games. Only one that freezes the systemis firefox so far. Did find this web browser called Epiphany that seems to work. Using it now to make this post.

Never mind. dumb question deleted

You could try opera, or compile firefox from source

Thanks for the idea. Is compiling Firefox something that can be done without having gone to school on Linux internals?
Just seems strange for something that did work to fail after two upgrades when people all over the world are having no problem at all.
How would I go about compiling Firefox?
How would I obtain the source?
Would it be simpler just to roll back to a working version of either Firefox or Ubuntu?

Thanks for your advice and assistance