I can confirm that it is a network problem. I have a wired and a wireless interface, but I am currently using wireless (eth1) and do not have my wired (eth0) enabled. As soon as I brought down eth1, both firefox and brasero worked perfectly for me (and I just assumed everything else would). After reading Ralf's post more carefully, the last line caught my attention when he said he could not "ping localhost". I tried that as well and it did not work. I then discovered that my loopback interface (lo) was not up for some reason. I brought both eth1 and lo back up and now everything works for me.
This does make much more sense to me now as I can see why most of these apps would need the lo interface to work and since it was disabled they would freeze. (I dont see why gedit or brasero would need it but I guess they do for some reason). The real question is now why my loopback interface was disabled. I dont ever remember disabling it manually. Thanks for the help Ralf. -- Firefox is extremely slow to respond; starts in about 4 min, gtk-damaged? https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/231384 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs