I noticed that thunderbird or firefox (can't remember) did not keep changes. turned out that the prefs file was created 444 instead of 644. don't know why they pulled this stunt.
Just checked on that: my profiles.ini has 644. Something odd happened as well: there was a 2nd .default created having 600, which was added to profile.ini. Now I manually changed the profile.ini to the oldest .default, and changed some prefs and added bookmarks. Now it seems to work. Not a clue though what was different and why.
