I'm on windows 7 here. As this topic seems to be about stuff not responding, I thought I'd add my two sense here.
I can use firefox OK but I've been having some strange issues too, but they didn't start today. They started a few weeks back.
Some programs are not responding lately, since December or so actually. Interestingly, these are related to Amazon, and today, Internet Explorer randomly joined the ranks.
Now, weirdly, I don't use IE so I think a program on my computer is using it at startup, maybe something from a bt piece of software we installed a few years ago, bt broadband desktop help, which I'm thinking about uninstalling because it's been discontinued, but I'm hoping it won't leave anything weird behind. Well, interestingly, because of this ie thing, whenever I loaded up NVDA, it kept on saying Amazon Assistant not responding, even though there were no other windows open. Sometimes, an even weirder issue happened, an internet explorer page could not displayed window shows up. It says make sure, and then it shows, a really weird address. I don't remember the exact thing, but it's somethign like res://aaresources.dll or something, and also, I keep on getting security certificate errors relating to this amazon stuff.
Then, to add insult to injury... I can't uninstall it! Amazon kindle uninstaller not responding, or, amazon assistant seems to do nothing if I try to uninstall from add or remove programs. It's starting to annoy me because I have to close this unresponsive amazon window every time I start up my pc, and sometimes, it's so unresponsive that it then says microsoft html application host has stopped working as well! Basically, from all the reports I've read, I think it's a piece of software, with quite a few issues that only got installed when I tried installing the kindle app. So, basically, I got a piece of software on here without my knowledge and I can't seem to get rid of it.