Sometimes malware will use your browser for its own ends. Please review this article and see whether this is the cause of your problem: Firefox.exe always open - MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Thanks for the ref to that excellent article. I didn't mention I was suspicious from the start and ran malware/virus det immediately, to date I've randomly run 5 diff det programs with no indication, but still suspicious! Am slowly working on items listed in art. Thanks again mcels