hello guitarfriend, plugins are usually installed on a system level and affect other browsers as well. that's why you cannot uninstall them from within firefox but only keep them disabled.

if you want to uninstall them you'd have to remove the programs that bundled the plugins and put them on the pc from within the windows control panel.

If you have more than one Firefox version installed, each with their own profile folder and you haven't started one of those then you can inspect the pluginreg.dat file from such profile version to check the name and installation location of plugins that you removed.

The about:plugins page now shows all installed plugins, both enabled and disabled plugins.

See also:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference/Plug-in_Basics#How_Gecko_finds_plug-ins
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Adding_Extensions_using_the_Windows_Registry

This problem still exists

As far as Philipps solution goes-all the plugins that I am speaking of are NOT installed on a "system level".I installed them myself THROUGH the Mozilla add-ons site.

And,as far as Cor-el's solution goes.apparently,he /she did not understand the question at all.....#1-I do not have more than 1 version of FF installed.Why I would is another issue entirely.And,#2,I WANT to "uninstall" certain plug-ins.I have not already done so.

  ?????????????? 
     Hmmmmmm.

Hi GuitarFiend, Firefox has multiple kinds of add-ons. The original answers relate to one kind, plugins, but what you install through the Add-ons site usually are extensions or themes. Can you check the other tabs to see whether what you want to remove is listed there?

orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Extensions category

orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Appearance category

What I wrote is about how to locate each plugin, so you can check which program it has installed and in which location.
Firefox stores its data on detected plugins in the pluginreg.dat file in the profile folder.
Due to a bug in Firefox 21 that has been partially patched, you can't see this path in Firefox on the about:plugins page like you can in other Firefox versions (about:plugins will work properly in Firefox 22).

Thank you cor-el.Your reply has cleared up my misunderstanding of your last post.Funny that you were still watching this after all this time.I was going through about 700 old emails (yes,700) trying to whittle down this inbox of mine.

jscher...What I wanted to remove are things that are not needed by me under the plugins tab such as realdownloader plugin (and various other - realnetworks realdownloader plugins),windows live photo gallery,google update (why is this even a part of the FFbrowser ?) and adobe acrobat.

Firefox finds a lot of plugins via a registry scan and you need to uninstall or disable such plugins via the program that has added them.

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Adding_Extensions_using_the_Windows_Registry
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference/Plug-in_Basics#How_Gecko_finds_plug-ins

Cor...I realize that I can "disable" these through the add-ons menu item in FF.But,that doesn't really solve my issue (which is basically just trying to free up some space on my hard drive.But,these plugins that I've mentioned are not listed in the add/remove programs list within my OS). So,I figured that they had to be a pert of FF ??? (And,thanks for your help my friend)

Some plugins like Flash come as only a plugin.

• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\

Other like the RealPlayer that you mentioned and Java come as applications that are installed as a program and add registry keys to make Firefox find the plugin.

Some try to install their plugin directly in a Firefox plugins folder that can reside in different locations (program folder, current profile folder, and its parent profile folder: Mozilla\plugins).
The pluginreg.dat file referenced about will always have the full path of each plugin.

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

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-remove-add-ons#w_how-to-uninstall-plugins

not entirely correct; there are a lot of plugins which are not uninstallable, as they were only ever installed as plugins.

Bah; this was in response to someone suggesting it's all windows installed.