When I scanned using Spybot Search & Destroy yesterday, more than 1,800 Firefox bookmarks were shown as potential threats. Without thinking through the possible consequences, I deleted them using Spybot Search & Destroy. (Or rather I assumed that Spybot Search & Destroy would allow me to restore them, but they didn't show up on the list of items which could be restored.)
Afterwards the bookmarks were obviously no longer in Firefox. Fortunately I back up my bookmarks virtually every day, but when I imported them, I was unable to delete the previous bookmarks which were still in Firefox, presumably because Firefox had been corrupted. Selecting files or folders and clicking on delete just didn't work.
I tried restarting my computer and also restoring the system to a Windows system restoration point, and when neither solved the problem, reinstalled Firefox. However, this didn't work either, so I uninstalled Firefox and removed all my personal Firefox data.
This and doing a clean Firefox installation from scratch did solve the problem, but as well as importing my bookmarks I also had to reinstall the Firefox addons that I use, and configure both Firefox and the addons. The whole process took a couple of hours.
Today the same 1,800+ Firefox bookmarks were again shown as potential threats, but needless to say I didn't allow Spybot Search & Destroy to delete them.
I've been downloading beta updates.
How did this happen, and how will I know when the bug is fixed?
David