You Tube/firefox issue

[Knipples]

Got this really annoying couple of things going on with my laptop, and i've exhausted everything I can think of to try, so thought I would try you lot.

I'm using firefox on a Windows 7 laptop, and the issue with firefox is (bear with me while I try and explain this) that I have to have two tabs open to get a page to load, and I have to flick to the other tab to get the page I want to load. For example if I want to look at something on facebook, I have to open a second tab or it just sits there refusing to load, but if I open the second tab (to look at another site, lets say BD) the facebook page loads, but then if I want to click on anything within facebook, I again have to flick back to the BD tab or nothing will load.

It does it on every website I try and look at, and whilst its fine to have two tabs open sometimes, it is getting a bit tedious now. The second tab then does the same thing in that if I then wanted to click on something on BD, I have to flick back to the facebook tab to get the BD page to open.

I've run the virus scans numerous times (have Avast on here, as well as superantispyware and malware byters) I have also reinstalled firefox recently, to see if that helped, but it didn't.

The other issue that may be linked to this, is that youtube either doesn't work at all (even loading the homepage) or takes ages to load, and then if I try and search for a video it takes ages and ages to give me the list of videos, and then to load the video itself, if it even works at all. Plus if people post youtube videos in threads, for the most part I can't see it embedded, I just see a white box where the video should be.

However I don't think its a bandwidth issue because if someone links to a video from somewhere that isn't youtube, it usually works, and I can stream stuff like iplayer fine, as well as when I "borrowed" some stuff via Leo a few weeks back, that downloaded all fine, and there is no issue with line speed.

Can someone help me please, because its driving me bloody insane.