"Alt+Home" keyboard shortcut or the 'show homepage' toolbar button should be able to do that.

Thanks for that, but unfortunately I cannot try them out. After posting the question I installed the Status-4-Evar add-on and it crashed Firefox. A reinstall/upgrade to version 5 did not help. Firefox has given me a number of problems apart from the two above so I have decided not to uninstall/reinstall as this would require a reinstall of AVG and some other security software and the problems would remain. So it is back to IE based Avant, which is pretty reliable and works in a natural way that I like.

You can find the toolbar Home button at the far right end of the Navigation Toolbar.

Drag the Home button from its current position at the right to the previous position at the left of the location bar if you do not like that new position.

Open the Customize window via "View > Toolbars > Customize" or via "Firefox > Options > Toolbar Layout"

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