What version of firefox are you using, Carman? Have you updated firefox?

There is a little triangle arrowhead used to scroll the bookmarks.

There have been some changes in pre release versions of Firefox.

What menus and icons are you using ? For instance are you using the new menu icon that is alongside the Bookmarks star in Firefox 29 and later ?

(Unlikely from the description) Or are you using a second click on the bookmarks star itself ? That has a slider on the scrollbar and has a tree of folders that may be expanded.

See Use bookmark folders to organize your bookmarks

Your System Details shows;

Installed Plug-ins

Shockwave Flash 14.0 r0 Shockwave Flash 13.0 r0

Having more than one version of a program may cause issues.

Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} While you are in safe mode; Press the <Alt> or <F10> key to bring up the tool bar. Followed by;

Windows; Tools > Options Linux; Edit > Preferences Mac; application name > Preferences

Then Advanced > General. Look for and turn off Use Hardware Acceleration.

Poke around safe web sites and see if there is still a problem. Then restart.

Thanks all for your help. I am running Firefox 30, in Win7 64 bit. Got rid of Hardware Acceleration - no help. Got rid of Shockwave Flash 13.0 - no help. Opening bookmarks, either from 'Bookmarks' on the menu bar, or by clicking the' Show your bookmarks' icon (next to the star icon 'Bookmark this page') gives the same result - a list of bookmarks with arrow heads pointing to sub-listings. When I open one of these it produces the expected sub-listing, withysome of the lower bookmarks running off the bottom of the page. I can find NO scroll bars for my bookmarks and can therefore find no way to move them

You're right, menus generally do not show scroll bars.

I find the mouse scroll wheel to be the fast way to move the menu items up and down.

If you are using a trackpad or other device that doesn't have a scroll wheel, hovering the tiny triangles at the top and bottom of the too-tall submenu should (slowly) scroll it, but if you're stuck with that...

To add a scroll bar to the drop-down menu, you can create a custom style rule or use an old add-on (the old add-on might require some manual updating). These threads have the details:

• Why can't I scroll in the bookmarks drop-down menu?
• The slider for Bookmarks Toolbar

Edit: The triangles are not nearly as slow as in the old user interface, but they remain tiny so hovering them with a trackpad is tricky business.

I use code in the userChrome.css file for quite some time to have scroll bars instead of the scroll buttons that work on hover.

• [/questions/1000428] Scroll Bar on Bookmarks

You can check for problems caused by a corrupted localstore.rdf file.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Corrupt_localstore.rdf

Thanks all again for your help.

jscher2000: The mouse scroll wheel didn't work for me - otherwise I would never have raised this problem

Since I had Firefox running satisfactorally on another computer, I decided something had corrupted the system. I totally removed my profile, re-established it, and copied the places.sqlite file from my other computer and now everything works fine again. No addsons at this stage, and will watch carefully what gets added.

Thank you