I didn't realize AVG had a search engine...

Are you displaying the Firefox search box? By default it appears next to the URL box and has the Google icon at the left and the word Google in light gray italic text in the box.

If you do not see this box, you may need to use the Customize Toolbars feature to restore it.

Alt+v (drops down View menu) > Toolbars > Customize

Check the box of buttons for the search box and if you find it, drag it to a convenient place on the main navigation toolbar.

With the search box displayed, if you click the Google icon on the left side, a menu should drop. The last item on the menu should be Manage Search Engines. Is yours missing?

I have a similar problem. Not sure what, but some software I installed sneaked in a POS malware for some ALOT search engine. I uninstalled the ALOT program but I see it still resides in my list of search engines. Unfortunately - I cannot find or figure out how to get to my search engine icon so I can remove this crap. I strongly suspect that ALOT did something to suppress, remove, or otherwise hide my search engine icon specifically so I could not get rid of it. Any suggestions?

@LongHawl, is the search box there but the icon/drop-triangle is missing?? I can think of two ways the malware might have hidden the button. The first would be if you still have an add-on that was left behind. If you check

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Add-ons > Extensions

Can you find any that sound unnecessary or suspicious? If so, try disabling them and restart Firefox to see whether that helps.

The second would be to add a style rule to a settings file which may exist in your profile folder. If you open

Help > Troubleshooting Information

In the first section you will find the button "Open Containing Folder". Click that, then double-click the chrome folder. If you see a file named userChrome.css then we would want to check that file for any rules which affect the toolbars. It is a text file you can open with Notepad or Wordpad or your favorite text editor. If you copy and paste the rules from the file here we can take a look.

If there are no questionable add-ons and no userChrome.css, then, hmmm, you might want to try resetting your toolbars to their default configuration. This article in the section "Reset toolbars and controls" has the instructions: Back and forward or other toolbar items are missing | Troubleshooting | Firefox Help. (To avoid losing other customizations, don't check any of the other boxes.)

Any luck?

thank you - "jscher2000". The problem is now solved. as you suggested, resetting the toolbars and controls worked.