There seems to be nothing in Preferences or anything, but after the other night, all new windows load in semi-full screen, where the File-Edit-etc menus are there, but the bar at the top isn't, and the taskbar at the bottom is covered by it. Its what happens with certain annoying ads, but now its any window. What the hell happened?

Maybe try pressing F11 to switch back from full screen mode. It works on my Linux box.

Arch Linux

yeah but it still opens that way every time.

Sounds hacked. I've had luck with un/re-installing.

sudo apt-get remove --purge firefox
sudo apt-get install firefox

which should remove all the config files and lay down new ones.

Shit.

Bigger problem: I run dual boot. I went without an antivirus for a while, got all these virus, still got one or two. One of them plays random sound clips out of nowhere. On windows. The other day it did that on Linux. Should I be worried? I recently formatted my windows partition, too, and have been using anti-virus too. Ah, i'll repost this in software.

NO need to remove firefox just create a new profile and remove the old one.

From my experience - if your computer was attacked by a virus - the only fail safe way to recover from it completely is to format your entire Hard Disk and then start over from scratch !!!

On a dual boot system, if you picked to use the DOS file system a Windows-based virus could potentially damage the Linux files but we don't see a lot of Linux on DOS files systems. Another problem is boot viruses. Boot sector viruses have steadily fallen over the years as people use less and less diskettes but file viruses can install Boot sector viruses and this potentially can render a computer non-bootable and a recovery of the Master Boot Record (MBR) would be needed. If the user has a dual boot system with Linux and Windows it could cause neither to start.

This also is interesting to note:
Quote: "{Win32,Linux}/Simile.D is a very complex virus that uses entry-point obscuring, metamorphism, and polymorphic decryption. It is the first known polymorphic metamorphic virus to infect under both Windows and Linux. The virus contains no destructive payload, but infected files may display messages on certain dates. It is the fourth variant of the Simile family. This variant introduces a new infection mechanism on Intel Linux platforms, infecting 32-bit ELF files (a standard Unix binary format). The virus infects Portable Executable (PE) files as well as ELFs on both Linux and Win32 systems. So far Symantec has not received any submissions of this virus from customers." -http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/ven...ux.simile.html

Also, you might look at your sound events especially if you are using KDE to see if it is playing a system sound for a background event.
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As far as your Firefox issue goes, if I am understanding you correctly, it is the issue where Firefox starts "pseudo full-screen" or "maximized" but with the title bar off screen etc.... IF that is what you are talking about then here is what fixed it for me.

Navigate to "System->Preferences->CompizConfig_Settings_Manager ->Utility->Workarounds->un_check_Legacy_Fulscreen_Support"
I don't know about on other systems, but on my ubuntu intrepid (8.10) It seemed to solve the issue.

Hope this helps.

-Captain

I'm on Gentoo 2008.0 with Compiz, and I can confirm TheCaptain's fix worked for me. Thanks!

Does this change have other implications? The tooltip for the option mentioned Wine, but I don't use Wine much if I can help it.

>>I have not really dug about to see if it has any undesired effects....though I have not noticed any thus far. I don't use wine for much, but the things that I DO use it for seem to be unaffected both windowed and fullscreen. I use swishmax / autocad / painkiller(game) and a cpl others on wine, and they seem fine.

Also, glad that worked for you.
Good luck mate!