A friend introduced me to the CoolIris (formerly known as Piclens) plugin for Firefox and like a giddy nit I downloaded it and plugged it into my spanking new Firefox 3.0.1 installation on this spanking new laptop.

Turned out it was one of the culprits that, with Norton 360 installed, caused programs to turn into zombies in Task Manager after I had closed them. Imagine having five instances of Firefox lined up in the Task Manager Processes list each consuming a minimum of 50,000K and you’ll feel the chill. Add to that other instances of programs that you have already closed, still sitting in Task Manager as running programs, eating up resources that they should have spit out a few seconds after they were closed. Feel your spine tingling now? Mine did, even with 2GB of RAM on this Intel Centrino vPro.

Googling around gave me two solutions. Disable the CoolIris plugin and unregister buShell.dll which is part of Norton 360’s backup component.

For a few minutes I couldn’t uninstall CoolIris through the Addons window in Firefox. Every click on Disable or Uninstall and Restart Firefox I made ended up with the plugin still there and enabled. I had to go into my Firefox Profile folder and delete the darned folders just to get rid of it.

But after the buShell.dll unregistration and the removal of CoolIris, I must report all is well on this installation. According to my research the same effect is caused by the Skype plugin for Firefox as well so if anyone out there is experiencing the problems stated above, look into both CoolIris and the Skype plugin on your Firefox browser.