I am always amazed when people say they have loads of photos or music that they do not want to lose or cannot replace yet have never backed up these valuables. If your hard drive fails tomorrow you have a very real problem. You are not alone in this and I am not trying to be mean spirited but if you fail to look after you and your possessions then who will? For less than $50 you can buy a name brand DVD-RW and for under $20 you can buy 100 blank DVDs. You can buy a lesser amount of blanks of course, that is a choice you can make. The DVD will come with software you install to use it. Or if you already have blank CDs you could use those in the DVD burner. If you back some of that stuff up and remove it from this computer it may well run faster because you will have more free space on the hard drive for the swap file to work better. Does your activity light come on frequently and stay on for long periods? If so this is an indication the swap file is have a problem. Then if you really want to get carried away you can visit Big Lots where they have (or did recently in the Buffalo, NY store) CD or DVD labels and the software to create your own labels for $10 or $11. Another option would be to install this hard drive as a slave in the new computer you intend to buy. You would need to check that there are compatible data connections in the new computer. Older hard drives are IDE or ATA but the newer and faster technology is SATA.

do you by any chance use xmarks to save your bookmarks? If not I highly recommend it, that way should you ever need to reload them they are all readily available and you can also access them from any computer since they also store them online on your private xmarks page. You did try rebooting the pc? have you tried a quick system restore to the day before this happened?

yes it always creates a backup so the latest dated one would be the one to use just follow those directions bob gave you and point it to the latest dated one like the 8-10 one you mentioned). also if anything else seems quirky you might want to do a system restore instead so you fix anything else that might have got scrambled, that may fix your firefox too so you may want to try that first. just do start, all programs, accessories,system tools , system restore, restore to an earlier date, select the date just before that blue screen happened and have it restore to that point. it will reboot and take a little longer, if you are not happy after you try that you can always tell it to just go back each one is undoable. IT might have wiped out your entire firefox profile, try the system restore first.

Although I can still get the list of bookmarks over to the left in FF, I have put all of them up on the Bookmarks Toolbar, where I have them organized under several headings, such as Books, Crafts, Financial, Media, Shopping, and so on. When I click on any of these, I get a drop-down menu, and on some of the menus, I have sub-headings; for instance, under Crafts, I have a folder called "buying," which contains sites where I buy fabrics or paint and other things online, and other folders for patterns, message boards, magazines, tips, and videos. You get the idea. When you want to create a new bookmark, the "Bookmark this page," box that comes up offers as the first location to put the new one, "Bookmarks Menu," but you can click on the quotation-like mark just to the right of that and it will change to "Bookmarks Toolbar." Then click on the "V" over to the right so you can see all the items on your Bookmarks toolbar and choose one of them to put the new one into. So that I can cram more items onto the toolbar, I make 2 or 3 letter abbreviations for their names, and I even have one heading for all the different sites that I use the most often. Hope this helps.