I mainly use FF Portable in the library. It's great, I can save all my bookmarks and plugins ready to be used as the library deletes everything when you log out. I noticed that it did not work too well on my vista machine at home but this is not a problem as I have Firefox on that one and don't use it that often. One of the libraries have updated from Windows XP to Windows 7. It still works but often freezes up and I can't manage to stream radio through it. I have not tried any of the other portable apps on the machines but the port app platform seems to work ok.
Everything works fine on XP and although XP is still quite popular, it is in general being phased out. It makes me wonder if FF Portable was designed and implemented when XP was at it's peek and running on other platforms was not considered. There seems to have been a lot of upgrades in recent months but will present and future platforms be considered in the design of future versions?
The idea of having a portable platform is just that, sticking your flash drive in any machine and it working, which has been the case (more or less)up to now but it will greatly sadden me if I can't use it if and when the other libraries upgrade, especially seeing as I have got a plethora of bookmarks all organised into folders and a whole bunch of extensions, plug-ins and other customisation just how I want.
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The Platform and all of our apps (including Firefox Portable) run fine on Windows Vista and 7, and I assume all (or almost all) of them work just as well on Windows 8.
My guess is that your library are using computers with a very low hardware spec (maybe the same machines they were running XP on) and that Windows itself is having a hard time finding the memory to run Firefox Portable properly.
The library in question has had an upgrade, pretty good processor and and is running 4GB of memory. That should be fine. Running installed Firefox works fine. The portable version will not play youtube or stream radio (if it ever loads). I tried out portable chrome and that works fine, including automatically updating the flash player. I don't want to use Chrome cos I am a big FF fan but it just does not work. I just saw in the forum that someone was having trouble with all the portable apps so they reformatted their flash drive as NTFS and it worked fine. So ill try that at some point but if all the other apps and browsers are working, then I don't hold out much hope.
Do you run Firefox Portable with any extensions installed?
If so I would try disabling them all, seeing what the performance is like, and if it is significantly better then re-enable them one-by-one to see if any are causing issues.