Hello, Penguin People. I have just checked out 42 pages of this sub-forum, so I do wish to assure you all that I won't start a thread for help until I do some mad research first.

But I need some help.
First, I have been having some total lockups that I need to do the cold reboot on. The mouse will still move, but no buttons will work, nor will the 3-finger salute, and I have to kill the PC from the power button. This is not good, this is like when I first ran stinking Windows.
Second, Firefox is crashing like crazy any more. I'm using it to type this now, but any time I try to go to YouTube or any site that needs Flash, I crash. I've gone through trying updates via YaSt, zypper, Firefox site plugin checks - nothing helps.

Can anyone give me some help on this? Even if it's a command line fix, I could at least do a copy-and-paste.

If you think you have problem with firefox flash, you can get information by going to verify java & firefox trouble shooting.

To rule out a corrupted profile as the source of your Firefox woes, try creating a new profile and use that to go online with Firefox.
To create a new profile simply run this command with Firefox closed:
A box will appear that will allow you to create or delete profiles.
Try the new profile and see if Firefox runs ok.

I did that, Tom, but it's still crashing.
I've deleted and reinstalled Firefox, nothing works.
So for now I'm using Firefox to check my e-mails and my MBs, but I'm opening Konqueror for my youTube vids. I'll keep it this way for now. Hopefully the next Firefox build fixes my problem.
Thanks for all your advice, people.

Have you checked firefox troubleshooting under the Help button on browser?
Go to about:crashes

On next system hang-up before doing a hard reset try Alt+SysRq+R (this will put your keyboard in raw mode) and then Ctrl+Alt+Del to do a soft reset. If that doesn't work either, try the B-U-S-I-E-R method (google for magic sysrq key).

Have you tried uninstalling flash and simply surfing the web for a while without flash to see if Firefox still crashes?
If Firefox does not crash with flash uninstalled, but if it does crash once you reinstall flash, then at least you can confirm that flash is indeed the problem here.

Also, you can try running Firefox from the terminal simply by typing firefox in the terminal and hitting enter. After Firefox crashes the output in the terminal may provide some clues as to where the problem lies.
However, if the whole system freezes up and requires a hard reset, then obviously the terminal output will be lost.

Just out of curiosity, have toy tried Chromium or Opera? I would be interested to see if they crash with flash, or if it just Firefox that is having problems.
Since you have confirmed that Konqueror runs ok, this may indeed be a Firefox only problem. Trying out other browsers with flash on YouTube would confirm this.

Sorry I don't have a solution; but this is how I would go about troubleshooting the problem.

Thanks for all your advice. It is appreciated.
Eddy: I went to about:crashes and found that my crash reports were only a mere fraction of the total.
Seg_fault: I'll try that method if I freeze up again.
Tom: Tried Opera before, I do not like it. Yes, Kong is fine, it seems to be a Firefox issue.

Good news. I went into YaST and downgraded back to Firefox 13. Flash is fine, I'm rocking out to the hard jams again. Nothing beats the Internet for music (well, other than going to a concert.)
It must be a box that needs fixing in FF14, so I'll just keep 13 for now, maybe upgrade to 15 after it's been out for a while.

Peace.