Large Webpage Loads Cause Crashes with Multiple Tabs (Buffer Overflow?)

Lately I've been experiencing bugs where I have several (2-3) tabs open, all of them are loading webpage content, and at least one of these tabs is in the process of loading a VERY large webpage (multiple MB)...and Firefox will become completely non-responsive. By non-responsive, I mean that I'm unable to switch tabs, unable to close the tabs which are taking so long to download, and even unable to exit from Firefox itself.

I must then do the infamous Ctrl + Alt + Delete, and only after several attempts am I able to close Firefox this way...on at least one occasion this problem has lead to a complete crash of my WinXP computer.

This is of course a very annoying bug...is there any known Firefox setting which may avoid this ?

Thank you !