[SOLVED]Firefox, Vista Internet Shortcut Problem

[UPDATE 8/17/2010 - see below]
Recently, I have been having a lot of annoying problems calling up Firefox from a variety of programs. Like Windows Mail, when I click on an internet shortcut link, I get an annoying [and bogus] message like "Windows cannot find ...URL... Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again." Mozillazine at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Windows_error_opening_Internet_shortcut_or_local_HTML_file_-_Firefox suggests that a misbehaving plugin might be a reason for the problem and suggests eliminating one by one to figure out which one might be the culprit! This can take hours depending on how many plugins you have. I tried setting Internet Explorer as a default browser, which made the links in Windows Mail, etc, work, but I do not want Internet Explorer to be my default browser! So I switched back to Firefox to be my default browser and the problem reappeared again! I do have a workaround for this, but I would like to hear from YOU, if you have a similar problem or if you have a true solution. So here is my workaround.

Simple workaround:

• EXIT FIREFOX
• START FIREFOX IN SAFE MODE (ALL PLUGINGS WILL BE DISABLED)
• EXIT FIREFOX
• START FIREFOX NORMALLY

This makes my internet shortcuts from various programs such as Windows Mail, Xenu, and others work again, and I get the links show up in Firefox. So let me know if you have a true solution, better than that from Mozillazine. Thanks!

[UPDATE 8/17/2010] I found that: 1) The solution above is not permanent - I kind of suspected that 2) Just restaring Firefox in a regular normal mode helped as well. So definitely try that first. Any more permanent solutions, let me know in the comments. Thanks!