I was having problems with hotmail yesterday. A warning would pop up about the certificate for hotmail being not valid. Then it out of blue started working in Firefox after I opened it up in IE. Beats me as to why.
Never got any warning about certificates. But re your process, I opened my Internet Explorer for the first time in a long time, and checked Hotmail. It came up and worked properly. Checked Netflix, et al, and they worked as well in IE.
Went back to Firefox, but unlike you, it was still acting hinky....Well it’s progress. At least I can access my Hotmail account now, thanks to you. :)
Just to let you know, My Firefox is back to it’s normal functionality...And after a day and a half of using IE, I can state that Firefox indeed loads pages faster. Something I really did not consider all that noticeable when I first “moved over” from IE.