Background: Firefox is working. Installed wireshark (plus accompanying apps) with Synaptic. TMI. Uninstalled wireshark. First hint of trouble: Firefox has forgotten my home page. Then, I get this on attempting to connect to gmail:

"Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to mail.google.com.
security library failure. (Error code: sec_error_library_failure)

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the
authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this
problem."

Reinstalled Firefox via Synaptic. No joy. Firefox misbehaves in other small ways as well (e.g. I can't put quote tags on the quote above). I've screwed up something, but I haven't a clue how to proceed.

The more complex the problem, the simpler the solution. (I wish). Deleted the default profile directory in
, and started firefox with . Followed the prompts to generate a new profile. OK, needed to redo my customizations, but the problem has been solved.