localhost pages stall or hang in firefox or IE

Localhost Hangs?

Are you testing your web pages in a Windows environment using Apache/ PHP/ mySQL? Do your pages hang or stall intermittently in Firefox or IE? This started occurring to me recently. Localhost would load fine (ie. http://localhost/alias), but then on occasion, particularly when loading a new site, the pages would simply hang, and restarting the browser would not fix the problem.

The solution

The answer? It turns out my new firewall, Look 'N Stop (LNS), needed to register the Apache service in order to recognize it on a recurring basis. In order to do this I had to go into my Apache Monitor, stop the Apache process, and start it again (restarting will not do the trick). This brings up the LNS dialog asking me if I want to grant apache.exe access to the Internet. I let it through, and the pages proceed to load fine.