This is not a widespread issue. It's very likely something unique to your machine, but it's hard to say what's happening without logs or a crash dump. Flash Player runs in a sandbox inside of Firefox. The whole point of that is to ensure that in the event that Flash crashes, there's no way for it to take down the browser.
What that says to me is that there's something happening underneath us. Just as an illustrative example, maybe we're tickling an underlying hardware driver, which results in a failure that Firefox doesn't handle well and *it* crashes. We shouldn't be able to make the driver or the browser crash, by design. It might be something like a flaky disk or an actual hardware problem (bad ram, flaky motherboard, etc.).
Mozilla in particular has excellent, public telemetry, and a bunch of my old colleagues work there. If we were taking down Firefox on launch in a widespread way, I'd definitely be hearing about it. We have a pretty collegial relationship.
Normally, my first guess would be a corrupt Firefox profile, but you're doing a clean install.
All I can offer are some guesses:
- If you're using an off-brand anti-virus/anti-malware/software firewall/security suite, you might try uninstalling it temporarily. In general, exiting those kinds of programs is not always sufficient to resolve that kind of problem. If you uninstall those things (working methodically, one product at a time) and the problem goes away, then it's probably your security product killing Firefox erroneously. If the problem persists, reinstall them. If it goes away, you'll need to talk to the product vendor about the issue, as they're either intervening inappropriately or are breaking stuff when injecting themselves into running processes, etc...
- Sanity check the disk. If the actual binaries are getting corrupted when you write or read them, that could explain why they're crashing on load. Also, because scanning the disk gives it a good workout, you might want to make sure that you have working backups first. If the heart of the problem is that your hard disk is dying, doing a bunch of high intensity disk activity might cause it to finally fail completely. Making sure that anything irreplaceable is backed up is probably wise.
Check your hard disk for errors - Windows 7:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2641432
Find and repair any problems with the disk, and then do a full uninstall/reinstall of both Flash Player and Firefox, if any problems were found.
- Is this an enterprise machine managed by your company's IT department? It's possible that they have a too-restrictive set of Group Policy Objects that cause Flash Player or Firefox to fail in unexpected ways. Having a conversation with your friendly IT folks might be necessary to get that debugged and resolved. (We see this a lot. GPOs are powerful, and there are a thousand ways to shoot yourself in the foot.)
If none of those help, an minidump would be super interesting. Hopefully Firefox is catching those quietly in the background, but if not, you may need to attach a debugger to get them.
Here are some articles on capturing crash dumps that might be useful:
Mozilla Crash Reporter - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
Capturing a minidump - Mozilla | MDN
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