And when it turned out that palemoon wasn't to blame at all, not even a murmur from the fans...

Credit where it's due to the fans.

(better luck next time, you've been a lovely audience)

I now have 3 GBs of RAM on a 64bit computer... 

Any luck Ron? I'm thinking with double the memory you'll be getting a better experience all around.

So far, so good.

I only had one 4 gig stick. Just replaced it with one brand new 8 gig stick. Hopefully my browser crashes are now a thing of the past.

Any luck Ron? I'm thinking with double the memory you'll be getting a better experience all around.

You *might* find that one of the sockets in the motherboard is faulty so the memory will work correctly in another socket. Or if you are really lucky just removing and replacing the memory will clean the connections and make it work.

Ouch. Perhaps I was wrong about that broken POS software...

So the RAM is bad and needs replacing, I presume. I'll see if I can get it done tomorrow. One question, how come the bad RAM is only affecting the browsers and nothing else?

So I installed memtest86+ and ran it. How long is it supposed to run? I cut it off after 2 hours and 46 minutes. I took three pics as it ran, one at 40 minutes, the second at 65 minutes, and the last at 2 hours and 46 minutes. Here they are. It doesn't look good, but I don't know how to decipher what it means

You've got a lot of errors. In the first picture, you have 8,192 errors, 2nd picture 12,288, and 3rd picture you have 30,464. You can see the # of errors count on the far right side of the display, kind of in the lower part of the blue box on top. You did 4 passes (when running memtest86+ just run it for one full pass and then hit the Escape key to exit), so you were averaging about 7,000-8,000 errors per pass.

Did you determine if you have 1 or 2 removable sticks of memory? As I said before, if you have 2 removable sticks, you could test each stick one at a time by itself and determine if you only need to replace one of them.

On the positive side, you have a nice CPU and your temperatures were looking good, so if you get some new ram you should notice a nice overall improvement.