i'd actually already set the value to zero, but i decided to give the extension a shot and it's great in the sense that you can do some stuff on-the-fly that are a pain in the ass to hunt down and change manually, thanks for the advice. i'm paranoid about extensions since if you don't like it, firefox does a lousy job at uninstalling them completely, which sucks when the supposedly uninstalled extension that broke some other function left the problematic values in your registry.this one's a keeper so far though.

my gripe with the calling home thing is not only is it a step away from why firefox, k-meleon, etc. were created but also that just unchecking the box doesn't totally disable the function. from what i can figure out, it looks like all it does is really disable the notifications, so it's sending the data unless you turn it off outside of the normal options menu. probably harmless, but i don't see any reason for it.