hmm, odd, I'll have to look into it.

Saving passwords and bookmarks is no issue, I made it a top priority to make sure I could back those up (firefox has a nice addon to export passwords to an XML file that you can re-import).

I'll try to get Chrome installed and TRY to get IE to work, it doesn't like my rig for some reason... guess MS doesn't like people building their own computers?  Anywho, I'll also try actually uninstalling the ad blocker instead of disabling it too.