Firefox freezes on startup

Just updated to Firefox 3.5.3, expecting some more security fixes on my Windows XP desktop but darn! Every time I start Firefox, it freezes instantly. I killed the process but the next time, again. I tried running it in safe mode. You do it by running :

"D:\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -safe-mode

What it does is starts Firefox like a fresh install, with all add-ons and extensions disabled. What can go wrong here? A lot. It will freeze again. This time I look for whats that is being shared in the safe mode as well? HISTORY!

I opened my Firefox profile, by running:

%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

I looked inside the folder, and found the size of my profile folder to be 450MB! Further investigation revealed this file called places.sqlite which had a size of 370MB, and what was it? It was my 9 months of history. One simple solution was delete the file, and firefox will rebuild it from scratch. But I could never afford to lose all those pages. So I downloaded the Firefox SQLite Manager. It helped me open up the file and edit the tables. So I deleted sorted the pages by last visited and let 5000 entries remain, out of the 85,000 that were there. It reduced the size of the file to 60 MB, and FF is now up and running. So, it was nothing to do with the update, I guess, although I have sent them a feedback. Oh God! How I hate all other browsers!