I'm using SuSE 9.1 and SuSE's official 1.03 RPM release of Firefox available here
http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/mozilla/firefox/ and I have the same problem. One way around it for me is to open one Firefox browser which will have the bookmarks missing, and then to open a second browser. The second one will have everything there.
I have also noticed that the browser will lock up every once in awhile for a few seconds.
I saw that SuSE has put out the 1.04 release, which I haven't tried yet, maybe that will fix a few things, besides the security issues.