Did you know that you can change the search engine the search bar uses by just clicking the engine's logo and selecting the one you want from the list?

Did you know that, from that list, you can also add the search engine of the page you're viewing to the list of available search engines?"

As for your issue, can you please try it in a new (temporary) Firefox profile and see if the issue is still present? See this article to know how to create a new Firefox profile. Please report back the results.

okay, let me rephrase that. now google wont work at all, not even in the browser search bar. I could have been mistaken, but I thought for sure it worked yesterday. I cannot access google.com from firefox at all now.  :( any ideas?

Do a malware check with a few malware scan programs.
You need to use all programs because each detects different malware.
Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of the database.

• http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
• http://www.superantispyware.com/ - SuperAntispyware
• http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html - Spybot Search & Destroy
• http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php - Ad-Aware Free
• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx - Windows Defender: Home Page

See also "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked and What to do when searches take you to the wrong search website

thank you, I'll work on those today. gosh I never thought beyond the trendmicro program I have now on this new system that supposedly cleans all that stuff up. I'm totally new to w7 and catapulted into the 21st century from wME only a couple of months ago <blush> so I'm still learning. I'll let you know how it works out. thank you for all those links!!!

YOU ROCK! hehe. I bookmarked all the sites you linked me to and first installed lavasoft, ran it.....and it fixed it! I can now access google via my browser search bar, as well as the google shortcut add-on. how malware can intrude and prevent something from working is way over my head, and so is figuring out how to fix it - so I am thankful to all you people out there who so graciously lend your time and brains to coax us other users along.

here is my meager contribution for the favor. the original lavasoft link wanted me to do some shopping on sponsoring sites in order to get it free and I wasnt able to find a way around that in their offer. I instead went to my favorite links site and located the latest free lavasoft ad-aware download and took it from there. you can find just about anything free on here that's regularly exchanged, including outdated versions for the older operating systems. http://www.filehippo.com/