I was browsing and firefox quit on its own and would not restart so I started up opera, in a few minutes the same thing happend and it would not restart either. I rebooted, turned off my modem and router, then when I started up firefox my bookmarks were gone along with all my preferences in both browsers and they acted as if they were never installed. Is this a hack or something? What logs should I look at? I have no idea what to do, if anything

I was browsing and firefox quit on its own and would not restart
You don't mention the version. That could be a clue. Next time load it from a shortcut or terminal window like "firefox 2>&1>>~/firefox.log". When it breaks again look at the log (that is, if it spits out errors).


so I started up opera, in a few minutes the same thing happend and it would not restart either.
Can you retrace anything like last time you upgraded stuff and what it was?


I rebooted, turned off my modem and router,
Rebooting is the best way to loose volatile data like kernel messages (dmesg) and process data (any processes an intruder would have). Rebooting and reinstalling stuff are typical "wintendo" reflexes and usually not necessary to fix problems (unless it's like *really* serious).


Is this a hack or something?
If it was it was a bad one. Apart from the defacers subclass the usual cracker species will want to be invisible as much as possible.


What logs should I look at?
Depends on your distro (please fill in your profile properly), but in general the system logs. Look in /etc/syslog.conf which ones. Usual name is "messages". Might not be necessary but good practice: run Chkrootkit and Rootkit Hunter if you have 'em installed and verify your installed packages if your distributions package manager supports that.

I had this happen in windows too. I think it's something with their new version of firefox.

It did not happen to me in linux tho.

Start Firefox with the profilemanager. And look in your profile folder chances are all the info is still there. Dont know about Opera as I dont use it.

When in your profile folder make sure the local.rdf isn't read only.