Ok, so I'm running Vista 32bit and this is the second time this has happened to me, and both times Firefox was the culprit. I was using Firefox, and it froze (I had two windows open with around 7 tabs in each), so I tried to close the window. Its not working and now one of them says "Not Responding". I am able to minimize, and maximize both of them, but I can't close or use them.

So next I tried opening up the task manager by right clicking the empty start bar area. This doesn't do anything at all, the task manager doesn't pop up.

So, I tried Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and nothing would happen for about 20 seconds, then a black screen pops up for about another 20-30 seconds, and then this error box shows up

> 
> Logon process has failed to create
>  the security options dialog.  
> 
>  Failure - Security Options
> 
> 
> 

I am able to press "Ok" and go back to my desktop and everything works except for firefox. I can obviously solve this by restarting my computer, but I want to figure out why this is happening. Any ideas?

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**UPDATE**:

I'm using Avast Home and Windows Defender. I've been using this set up for 2 years now without any problems. Also, this doesn't happen all the time, its happened twice in the span of a month! so weird..