Hi SteveWells:

Any chance you use Norton for your antivirus protection (e.g., Norton Security)? If so, please see PaulGo's thread Firefox 44 Release Candidate - Password Problem regarding a known Bug 1242176. This bug apparently results in the accidental loss of Firefox passwords after browser configuration settings are changed by the Norton Identity Safe extension.

32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox v44.0 * NIS (2014) v21.7.0.11

In the event that the passwords information is lost, you should record all information in a separate text file somewhere else on your hard drive, or written down. You can easily copy and paste if you need to do so. If you are concerned about someone else looking at that file, you can compress it using a password.

SteveWells said

I have followed the Firefox refresh procedure but my passwords are still missing.

Hi SteveWells:

Were you able to recover your passwords? According to the support article Recovering important data from an old profile you might be able to copy the key3.db and logins.json files from your old Firefox profile over to the new profile created by the Refresh Firefox feature, assuming they weren't permanently wiped by the bug I mentioned in my previous post.

Firefox v44.0.1 was officially released today (08-Feb-2016) and the release notes at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/44.0.1/releasenotes/ list the following as one of the bug fixes:

"Fix a rare bug which triggered the removal of stored passwords (1242176)"

32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox v44.0.1 * NIS (2014) v21.7.0.11

I was unable to recover the passwords as the old profile file was also already empty.

I've called the big guys to help you. Good luck.

Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web Link} by holding down the <Shift>
(Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox. Is the problem still there?