I am thinking you may be right.
Although my scans have not shown any problems, Chrome has been experiencing Shockwave/Flash crashes regularly in the last few weeks, and the help suggests to delete the profile and to recreate it.
I am going to run HiJackThis again tonight and will post the results. Will then also create a new profile on Chrome.
Will also see what I can do about Firefox, since that also does not load pages correctly.