Over the past week, my machine’s performance was getting worse and worse, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It seemed to be linked to Firefox, because it was using 99% of the CPU and way too much memory.
Today while I was using IE to see if I could replicate the problem, I decided to import my Firefox bookmarks. Imagine my surprise when I went into the default profile and saw over 5000 bookmarks.html files (they were numbered bookmarks-01.html, bookmarks-02.html, etc). Based on the create date and time on each file, it looked like Firefox was spawning a new file every 30 seconds since I reinstalled Windows XP.
I removed Firefox and reinstalled it and everything seems to be fine now. That was so freaky! I couldn’t find anything online (not that I searched all that extensively) about this, so I’m not sure what could have caused it. I suspect it had something to do with an extension I installed, so I’m not installing any for the time being.