[SOLVED]screen freezes when starting mozilla apps.

[snork]

Sometime during the last couple of updates (I update every week), I noticed that whenever I click on the icon to start either SeaMonkey or Firefox, the entire screen/desktop freezes for about 2.5 seconds before they appear. This doesn't happen with Chromium or OOwriter, or any other program that I try. The disk is not being accessed during that freeze time, and in fact the computer is strangely quiet while those are loading. That quietness is what started me to look more closely what is happening. Firefox is at ver 18 and SeaMonkey is at ver 2.16.

I've tried starting them from the command line, the same thing happens, with no additional information. gdb doesn't produce anything exciting either.

Anyone else noticing this behavior? Anyone have any ideas what might be causing the freezing for about 2.5 seconds when starting up only those two programs?

p.s. Thunderbird and SeaMonkey mail also produce the same short freeze.

[Waldo22]

System specs?  How much ram?

[menotu]

Additionally have you tried creating a new Firefox profile - with no add-ons - to see if  the problem still occurs?

[snork]

Sorry about thee lack of info. It was late and I was tired.

Gigabyte GA-F2A75M-DD3H motherboard
AMD A8 5600K Quad core CPU
Nvidia GEForce 8400 GS 512MB
8GB RAM
PCLinuxOS PAE Kernel (fully updated) uname -a=(3.2.18-pclos2.pae)
KDE 4.9.2

I just created a new Firefox user and the problem still exists. Again, this happens no matter what Mozilla product I start. And, ONLY Mozilla programs.

I have gkrellm and I start 'system monitor', so I can see constant movement on the desktop. When I start up any Mozilla program, both monitoring programs freeze for a short time until the program actually starts up.

I can't figure out what Mozilla programs are doing during that short period of time. As I mentioned, the disk lite is not on until just before the program UI is just about to be shown. Those programs seem to take a little longer to load than I remember. The delay happens on each start. i.e. after starting one instance, the delay happens when I start another instance.

Nothing show up in any logs that I can find.

I'm stumped!

[SOLVED]

After a lot of searching, it seem that quite a few other people have had this same problem, only with Mozilla applications. It turns out to be the Nvidia drivers. The new drivers are not compatible with  older cards, such as mine (the 8400 GS doesn't seen that old). I switched to older driver and things are back to normal. Desktop doesn't freeze and the disk starts making noise as soon as I click on any Mozilla application. I find that very funny.