I don't know if anyone can help with this (or even if anyone is interested) but I have finally tracked down an issue which was beginning to bug me.
Here's the scenario... Over the past few months I have noticed a number of pieces of software which rely on a fairly low level network card access having issues whenever I started a web browser. The most significant of these was my CAD application (which uses the MAC address of the LAN card for licensing) actually loosing the license every time I started Firefox. This was obviously quite annoying as my only fix was to exit and start again. Then it happened with a piece of wireless scanning software (inSIDDer) which would loose access to the wireless card whenever I ran Firefox on my laptop. This meant that my issue was affecting 2 different machines in similar ways. I loaded the CAD software on the laptop as well and it did the same thing as the desktop. Anyway... to cut a long story short, I eventually tracked the issue down to Google Gears and the "location" permission in the web browser. Whenever Gears requests the "location" then my other applications are "tripped up". I have now disabled the location permission and the problems have cleared. I tested this pretty extensively and I'm 99% confident that that was the cause. I don't know if this is a bug in Gears or a bug in the applet which were calling it but at the end of the day it is pretty annoying. Does anyone care to comment? Cheers, Sam
