First of all Firefox isn't a POS... it's the most reliable browser I've ever used (and I've pretty much lived on my computer for at least the past 15-20 years).
That said, look in your "Documents and Settings" folder in explorer. Under your user name and Applications Data you should find a folder for Mozilla and under that Firefox with a folder called Profiles under that. There should be a folder with a (something).default and a bookmarks.html file there -- those are your bookmarks. There should also be a bookmarks.bak file which is a backup of your bookmarks that Firefox creates every time you exit the program. You can just rename the .bak file to bookmarks.html and that should restore your bookmarks.
If that doesn't work, under your .default profile folder there should be a folder called bookmarkbackups -- you should be able to copy one of those to your default profile and rename it to bookmarks.html -- that will also restore your bookmarks.
Kids.
