mozilla problem
 

Alright, I went to fire up mozilla and it started as if it was the first time that I used it. Everything has been reset, all m bookmarks are gone as well as all my settings for mail and news. I used the browser not 20 minutes before this happened and everything was fine. My biggest concern is retrieving my bookmarks and ensuring this doesn't happen again. Im' running mandrake 8.2 wich came bundled with mozilla 0.9.8. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Most of the time everything that is personalized with settings is in the .mozilla directory in your user's home directory. I'm not sure what could have made everything reset but you could most likely back that directory and contents up and it should save all your settings.

I've ran into this before with Mozilla as well. For some reason when I open Mozilla from certain applications it gives me the boring default skin and no bookmarks. It is possible that Mozilla is being run from different directories(especially if you have updated versions) and thats why it is getting different bookmarks and such. Do a:

locate mozilla | more

and run each seperate mozilla command if you have more then one. Oh I'm not sure if mandrake has the "locate" command. I never used mandrake before.

locate is in the "findutils" package which is part of every distro.