Curly question about digital certificates.

For a new job I'm going to have to be logging into a Web-enabled
database.  I've been issued with two digital certificates to install. 
One is from the database owner and appears to be a text (albeit
nonsensical text) file with the suffix .pem    The other is my personal
certificate and carries the suffix .p12    The database owner is a
Windows shop and gives instructions for importing the certificates into
Internet Explorer only.  They suggest that Mozilla should work but will
not offer support for it.  I'm of course anxious to use Mozilla or
preferably Galeon (which is my browser of choice).  I'm not worried
about support if I can get started.

The difficulty I'm encountering is that IE 6.0 imports the .pem file
without demanding a password (as none has been supplied), but Galeon,
Mozilla and Netscape Communicator (each running in my RH 7.3 partition)
each demand a password for the .pem file.  As I can't supply one, the
installation fails.  (The .p12 file, for which I have got the password,
is not a problem.  The .pem file does not install with the .p12 file's
password.)

It doesn't seem logical that digital certificates should be handled
differently in Windows and in Linux, rather it strikes me that IE is
doing something the other programs are not doing (or more likely,
failing to do something the other programs are doing).  Can anyone offer
any guidance in this situation?

=====Andrew

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