PDFCreator and mybrowserbar.com (Adware!)
Hi!
If you have recently encountered a weird behavior within your browser (I only know of Firefox because that's what I use), chances are that Adware has been installed onto your computer.
When I was looking for a picture on my own website and I mistyped the URL, I noticed that immediately after it showed me my custom 404 page, I was redirected to a domain called mybrowserbar.com. The URL was:
http://www.mybrowserbar.com/cgi/errors.cgi?q=[404URL]&type=404&ISN=[funkystring32]&ccv=130&cnid=302398&cco=US&ct=12
with [404URL] as the wrong URL. [funkystring32] seemed to be some kind of MD5 string (32 characters, 0-9, A-F), maybe a unique identifier.
After searching the internet for a couple of minutes, I read a thread on the official Avira forums. In it it was explained that PDFCreator comes with an Adware called "Search Settings Plugin" that installs and enables itself in Firefox. Luckily, being a normal addon, the problem was quickly solved from there: Tools => AddOns => Extensions => Search Settings Plugin => Uninstall/Disable.
I can only shake my head at things like this.
There has also been discussion on the official pdfforge (PDFCreator) forums about this:
http://www.pdfforge.org/files/old_forum/2903.html
Thanks to the people at the official Avira forums! Oh, and nevertheless, in all honesty: thanks to pdfforge for providing such a nice tool. I have the feeling it's gonna be of great help to me in the future 
Source: http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=895237
Firefox Lags + Sysinternals
Hey!
I've recently found out about a majorly annoying phenomenon that can be experienced if you launch a performance-hungry application through Firefox, mostly through downloading a file and opening it directly from Firefox.
Why?
Speaking in terms of process trees, firefox.exe is the root process (or parent process) of the child process, say for example Azureus / Vuze. Vuze is known to be rather performance demanding and when it needs resources, it will take them not only from the system itself, but also noticably from the parent process. I don't know if it's common behavior, but usually that shows in Firefox experiencing the occasional couple-of-seconds lags.
The solution? Close Firefox and restart it. That way, all its child processes are raised to the same level firefox.exe was on and you can now browse without any more lags disturbing your streaming videos or anything else
I realized this when I was running Process Explorer by Sysinternals (a company that creates awesome tools for Windows. In fact so awesome they ended up being bought by Microsoft 
). It's a great tool to see not only Process IDs, CPU usage, RAM usage and executable names, you can also see dependencies (parent/child processes), CPU time, threads, etc. As a very nice feature it can also show little diagrams of resource usage (CPU and I/O ops) as task icons in your task bar next to the system clock! So much better than the built-in task manager!
Also check out the other tools by Sysinternals. I use Process Explorer and Process Monitor.