This might be a silly answer, but have you actually told firefox to download to a different location?

Personally I always have Firefox ask me where to download files.

you hit it on the nail. i had suspected such a thing, but the folder was always empty when it reappeared. however, that was the answer. I thought i had told it to always ask. But, since it was always downloading straight to the desktop, i was reluctant to accept that as an answer. Sureenough,however, I HAD told it to DL there, even though it wasn't. So, it seems to be fixe. And, no, that wasn't a silly question. A silly question would have been something like, "did you smear peanut butter on your CPU before the incident? Thanks anyway. You were smarter than a whole lot on netusers, and now, so am I, again, just like the good old days when folks actually tried to help each other out instead of selling adware.