»In which we enter Safe Mode and screw the pooch

I have had some trouble getting Firefox to trim certain built-in toolbars. I want to maximize the screen space I have, eliminating the Bookmarks and Navigation toolbars (but keeping the Status bar -- I could not cheerfully browse without the "Connecting to ..." messages!). Each time I load the program, I find that I had to make the customization; the changes would not persist across restarts. I looked through the various .js bits in my Profile, but could only find the incantations to make third-party toolbars go away (and these worked, curiously). I looked into the userChrome.css file, and mucked around with user.js, to no avail (I had to guess at element names). I looked through the Mozillazine Knowedgebase and tried making the changes in Safe Mode; that didn't do the trick. Someone helpfully pointed me to the workaround for a localstore.rdf bug, and this worked like a charm. Yay: another 24 pixels.

Bye the bye, the magnificent expression "Screwed the pooch" comes from Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff":

The phrase 'screw the pooch' itself was derived from an earlier phrase that was quite familiar to those of us in the service in WW2. I was a Fire Control Computer technician (Fire Controlman) in the US Navy 1944-1946. Anyone who has ever been in the military has spent an inordinate amount of time in a 'stand-by' formation waiting for someone to get the orders to start some activity. Many man-hours were spent in an activity that was commonly known as 'Effing the dog.' [Note: They didn't really say, 'Effing,' but I'm sure you can figure it out.] Back home in civilian life this was cleaned up to the slightly more acceptable 'screwing the pooch.