How the heck did this happen??

[Vicky]

George told me that some updates to Firefox were loading and then all of a sudden - poof! - Firefox was gone. No shortcut on the desktop, no listing in Programs. Vanished. I checked it out and yes, it is gone.I re-downloaded it and I THOUGHT my bookmarks would be gone - but they are all there. Phew. Still, how did it vanish like that?

[Storymama]

It sounds like you (George) got a corrupted download. That can happen with any download, unfortunately. Firefox definitely updated yesterday, so I wouldn't be concerned that it was some fakey virusy thing off the bat, but it's probably a good idea to scan with your virus and anti-spyware stuff just to be sure.

There is a way to check the validity of your download, called checksum. Google has a ton of info if that's something you want to look into. I use a program called FastSum when I need to do checksum checks. It's sort of one problem with autoupdating anything - no opportunity to validate the dowload :-/.

Anyway, you did the right thing - reinstallation will fix it usually.