Ok, thanks for all the responses. I figured out the issue. I had to go to "help" and "Restart with add-on's disabled" and then I did that again and selected "Help" and "Troubleshooting information" and "Reset Firefox".
That, along with installing the latest version of Java, and I'm good to go...
Maybe this will help somebody else in the future. I just hate using IE because it's got such a giant footprint on my laptop. Firefox and Chrome are much less 'invasive' to ones computer. I'm hearing that there are others out there for the computer guru's to use, but I'm not that saavy on computers yet.
Kilroy