changes in Firefox are not kept

[Huub]

I noticed that thunderbird or firefox (can't remember) did not keep 
changes.  turned out that the prefs file was created 444 instead of 
644.  don't know why they pulled this stunt.

Just checked on that: my profiles.ini has 644. Something odd happened as 
well: there was a 2nd .default created having 600, which was added to 
profile.ini. Now I manually changed the profile.ini to the oldest 
. default, and changed some prefs and added bookmarks. Now it seems to 
work. Not a clue though what was different and why.