Are you really running Firefox 7 ? That version contains numerous publicly disclosed security flaws and is not safe.

Which version did you test that had the problems ?

If your home page setting in Options is being ignored, check whether you have any extensions that you do not recognize or do not absolutely need and disable them all:

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Add-ons > Extensions category

my broswer was set to aumatically update so it was the latest version of firefox. there seems to be a number of problems with it which have been overlooked , not enouigh guidance for putting back personal settings, and then even when applied and restart it fails to take notice. this is only the second time in all the all the years of using ff i have had to fall back to an old vrsion. the lastest version is buggy and needs more work. i know 7 has security issues but the lastest versions blocks you from doing what you want mozilla really should do more thorough testing before imposing an update

First, it's not only version 17 and version 7, you can get version 16 here:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/16.0.2/win32/

Second, each version undergoes a lot of testing, but because everyone tricks out Firefox in their own way, and it runs on a diversity of systems, there will always be individual problems that were not foreseen at the time of release. This can't be avoided, but the volunteers here help people work through them.

It also sometimes happens that settings files become corrupted during an update. In some cases, it can be fixed with a setting, utility, or add-on, and in other cases, the file needs to be deleted and rebuilt. But no point diving into details until you are on a more recent version.