It sounds like you got taken over by Babylon, which is pretty much malware. How to remove the Babylon toolbar, home page and search engine can help.

Thanks tyler for the response.. i just reinstalled it clean. How can i recustomize it like it was before? the first time i downloaded it i.e. firefox22 it was automatically at a page that had some button for customization now i dont see that this second time around.

Do you remember what the homepage you had before was? How to set the home page Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars Personalize Firefox - an overview of customization options

it was just the mozilla firefox startpage.. i dont even know how the whole babylon search page came up. Im gonna sift through the link above to see if i can get it back to how i had it.

Im not seeing anything that deals with adding a background or sites as tabs to the bottom unless i missed it. The first time i set-up firefox22 it let me do all of this stuff from the beginning.. the second install didnt for some reason.

Try to use the SearchReset extension to reset some preferences to the default values.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/searchreset/

Note that the SearchReset extension only runs once and then uninstalls automatically, so it won't show on the "Firefox > Add-ons" page (about:addons).

If you do not keep changes after a restart or otherwise have problems with preferences, see:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved

will that work if i did a clean reinstall already? when i deleted it the first time i didnt save any preferences.

Alright this makes no sense..

Question #1 how come with the first install i could customize everything right from the startpage and their was a button for it? (and even after the first install upon opening my version of firefox22 as my startpage that customization button was there, which enabled me to change backgrounds, add websites as tabs at the bottom of that page etc. What happened to that?

Question #2 how can i manually set a background to my homepage since the previous customization button is gone.

Question #3 how can i add websites to the lower half of my page manually as they were before (the same way you can on Opera Browsers)

1, 2, and 3 = Sorry, Firefox doesn't have a built-in feature to "customize" the default about:home "start page", like what is in Opera. It sounds like you may have installed an Add-on for that.

There are a number of Add-ons which add that feature.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=start+page&appver=22.0&platform=windows

well i have no idea how that happened then from the beginning because it let me do it from the very beginning before i added any add ons, themes etc.