The new rapid release development cycle has bit Mozilla in the rear. For example, FF 7.0.1 on Vista needs to be run as Administrator. I didn't find this out until it just stopped working on my wife's laptop.

Uh, no, of course it doesn't. Something is seriously fubar on your side.

The automatic updates have to ask for admin rights, is that what you are seeing? You can deny admin rights and it will run fine (without updating). And they know it's not optimal, they're fixing that in the next version.

It was something to do with the compiler deleting the source file if there was a type error within it.

Kamikaze programming.