Not the answer you would like,but,Firefox does this with XP pro,also.Never
can understand why. Go to Explorer ,and the site is fine.

Im on youtube all the time and it doesnt crash for me.

Do you have any extensions installed? Those might cause a crash. Firebug has
serious problems with Gmail. It might with youtube as well.

The obvious thing is to not go back to those two sites until you resolve your
problem. Since both sites are Flash oriented I would check other Flash sites and
see if you can duplicate the problem. If it seems to be Flash that is the
culprit, then I would re-install Flash. If you suspect Firefox check out the
same sites with another browser. If Flash works there then copy the Flash files
directly from the settings folder that works to the one that doesn't. Flash can
be found in your hidden folder .mozilla/plugins and a similar folder for other
browsers such as Flock. There are two files to copy named: flashplayer.xpt and
libflashplayer.so.

I come home turn the machine back on, and now FireFox is just fine at
both sites.

However, now I'm back to Linux not properly configuring the network
card. It's hit or miss thing. I can power up 5 times and get a good
IP address from my router and off we go. Then it can fail another 5
times in a row. Vista never has a problem, and the computer is about
a month old.

However, Linux does seem to like the wireless card that is also in the
computer, and since my router also does wireless for the rest of the
family I have an alternate path. I have no idea why sometimes the
network will come up on the wired connection and sometimes not. If
Vista was also flaky I would suspect the card. For a while I thought
maybe Vista was leaving a little something-something behind in the
card. But I also tried killing power to the computer at the power
strip. Worked a couple of times and I thought I was on to something.
But then the next few times it didn't, so it was more of the
randomness of the whole deal playing with my mind.

I'll take FireFox not crashing over wired network, so if i can only
have one this works best.

Unlike another report, I am not having any problems using FireFox with
gmail. At least not so far. Maybe that is next.

If I can get the windows programs I really need to use to work under
wine, and then especially if the network thing gets nailed down, then
Vista can go onto a back-up never to be seen again.

Flash advertisements are evil. To help from FF from crashing and it does happen.
Please go to the mozilla web site and install flash blocker. It is all most
surfing the net add free. To play flash is simple. Just click on it once flash
blocker has been installed. You might want to install updates. There has been
some changes with FF to help stop the crashing. It was really bad with Drapper
version of Ubie. It was really bad.
WIFI issue on your laptop can me a frustrating issue. So if you can tell
us your wifi card and or your lap top. Then I may be able to help you debug that
issue.

I had a similar problem a few months back, when I visited certain
sites and tried to watch videos or open flash windows firefox would crash.

All I did was a complete uninstall of firefox. Restarted the computer.
Fresh install of firefox and the problem has never happened again.

Was strange, started happening for no reason and has never happened
again since the fresh install.

At this point there seems to be no rhyme or reason to anything it's doing.

After a reboot of the machine, Firefox is suddenly OK with any site.
Which I'm not complaining about. The network card seems to play
nicely when it feels like, but when it doesn't no amount of twiddling,
rebooting or killing power seems to make a difference. It works when
it feels like working. The wireless card seems to work 100%.

The network card is a Realtek. Not sure about the wireless.
(Whatever HP decided to throw in there. It's a Pavillion, not a lap
top. So I've also checked that the card is securely seated. (Though
Vista, for all it's other faults, has no prolem with it.)

Yesterday, Firefox refused to launch until I did a full reset. Not
sure why. I'd click on the icon, it would do the little flash like
it's launching thing, and then nothing would ever happen. Tried
several times over several desktops.

I have had a problem with Firefox 3 on Hardy which begins to launch and then it
tells me that it is already running. I go into the Task Manager and kill Firefox
that is running and re-launch it and it seems to be okay. Since Firefox was a
beta, it never concerned me much. It will annoy me if it persists beyond the
final release later this week.

I have FF on Hardy and it loads just fine but if I occidentally do a
double click to FFs load and I have to wait the full load before I can
click the X to close one.

This will not help your problem but if I were you I would delete and
re-install via synaptic.

I had the same problem, so I just unistalled
FF3 and installed FF2. I have not had a problem since. Maybe this would work for
you?