I may be jinxing myself here, but I haven't had a crash in over 2 days, since I started using Chrome and reinstalled Firefox. I did uninstall Adobe Reader and AIR but, for the time being, don't need a reader as long as I'm using Chrome as the default reader. There may be other issues with my computer but, for the time being, this one appears to be solved. Thanks for your responses.
Repeated full system virus scans and Norton Power Eraser show no infection and Disk and memory checks come back with no problems.Crashes often occur while running Firefox. I was away for a week on several different wifi systems and experienced no crashes, but crashes resumed as soon as I returned home. Running Windows Vista Home Premium (SP 2) on a Dell Inspiron 1720. Search of Faq's suggest problem could be caused by recent installation of USB device, but no new devices have been installed recently. Current USB devices are printer, wireless mouse and camera dock., and none have caused problems in the past.. Printer and camera dock were not connected while on road.
Windows Vista crashing frequently with "bad pool caller" message.