Tarq57, I have AVG Free. As dumb as this sounds, I'm not really sure how I first managed to get into hotmail--I tried so many things...looked for installed programs that might take me to the Internet. But the interesting thing is that hotmail now seems to be linked to Outlook Express, which never worked before. I have always used hotmail exclusively on this computer.
Vitesse, I tried reinstalling Firefox but to no avail. It still tells me it crashes as soon as I try to open it.
This is one of the weirdest things I have experienced on my computer. In the meantime, I'll just keep hotmail open because then I can get to Pprune, and other sites like Google.