After opening Firefox Portable (v49) I try to open another site from my favorites (or open a tab and enter a url (e.g. www.google.com) directly. The spinning icon just spins and the site doesn't open. If I copy the same url entered into Chrome or IE the site opens immediately. I use two add-ins, Ghostery and ABP. When I try to open FF without add-ins I can't. When I disable those add-ins, via the FF menu, this doesn't seem to help. I have no proxy setting. After a while (15 min or so) sites start responding more quickly. Sometimes, while waiting, the status bar says "waiting for www.googletagserices.com..." or other things but the tab just keep spinning for another minute or so.
Resetting the user will wreck havoc on all my settings, even though "some" will remain, so I don't want to do that. Besides, the "Reset User" isn't available to me either. My data for FF is a "hard link" to a network directory. This has worked fine on my windows 7 and 8.1 machines. I just got this new Windows 10 Pro machine and the problems seem to be relatively recent, for the last few weeks of this new machine's 1.5 month active life. I've tweeked everything (e.g. TB mail, etc) to use FF Portable as the default browser instead of FF or Chrome or IE.
I did this just a few minutes ago trying to access this support page and FF was just spinning. I then clicked on the 1st tab, which had the home page displayed (which was immediate upon opening FF), and refreshed the home page and the tab just spun. I opened Chrome and as soon as Chrome opened the same home page FF finished spinning and displayed the home page. When I entered directly into Chrome's url the url of this support page Chrome went to it immediately and FF then displayed this page.
I'm not able to start FF with add-ons disabled because the window just disappears. A look at the Windows task manager shows FF running but I can't get it to come back to the foreground. Any ideas would be appreciated as I've taken all the recommended troubleshooting steps except resetting my user. Thanks