Momentary freezing with Firefox

[Menalaus]

I booted up my computer this morning and I've been experiencing momentary freezing in Firefox ever since. Every time I move the mouse around, open up a new link, etc., it happens randomly, but everything freezes for a split second and then continues like normal. This is persistent and continues to happen through continued usage. I've run a full McAfee scan with nothing coming back. I've tried a restart and I get the same problem.

What gives?

 

[cl-scott]

You happen to install some kind of link scanning extension, or maybe you updated your AV software and it installed a Firefox extension to do that?

 

[Menalaus]

Sorry I wasn't clearer. I'm using Windows 7, I have not installed anything recently. Also this problem persists for all browsers. Also I'm just noticing that the problem doesn't seem to be limited to what browser I'm using, but I'm also getting momentary freezes when just browsing around the computer (opening up the start menu, looking through folders, etc.).

EDIT: I don't rightly understand it, but I got to thinking that perhaps the problem had something to do with the mouse (I fired up a video game to see if I would replicate the same results--the process wouldn't temporarily freeze, but I noticed the mouse would continue to momentarily lock up randomly). I unplugged the USB mouse and replugged it in. Everything is fixed.

For clarification, why would my mouse do something like that to my system?