I fixed it and I must admit, I feel like a fool.
I restarted my computer and that seemed to do the trick as when I get back into FF, my email, FB, and other items all need the passwords which is a good thing.
Thanks for your help.
Not a problem, and nothing to beat yourself up over.
It has been my experience that Firefox doesn't act consistently on any two computers, no matter what operating system. Each machine has it's own little quirks. i haven't been able to use Firefox to log into my Yahoo mail account for a couple of years. i use Opera for that. Never did figure out why Firefox quit doing that.
i know why this operating system and configuration doesn't do it...i took the profile folders from SuSE 9.2 when i upgraded to OpenSuSE 11.1 so that i wouldn't lose bookmarks, passwords, mail, etc.