Before someone states that this is not a Scientific Linux issue, as it 
seems to be restricted to this distribution (perhaps other EL 
distributions as well), this issue would seem to qualify.

Rather than using the Mozilla packages that exist within the 
distribution repository, I use the production (not testing or beta) 
installations from Mozilla:  firefox, thunderbird/lightning, and 
seamonkey, currently 10.0.2 except SeaMonkey 2.7.2.

My laptop and workstation are operating environment identical except 
that my laptop is IA-32 SL6x and my workstation is X86-64 SL6x (and 
there are some hardware differences reflected in driver differences). 
On my workstation, as root, I can update any of the Mozilla applications 
I have mentioned within a major release (e.g., 10.0.1 to 10.0.2) from 
within the application.  However, on my laptop, this generally fails and 
I must download a new tar.bz2 file that I must unpack into the 
appropriate directory.  Does anyone have an idea on what is the reason? 
  Note that my mozilla configuration files between the two platforms are 
the same in so far as I have any control over these (e.g., visitation to 
different URLs from firefox or seamonkey might have different cookies, 
etc., loaded -- but all URLs are either mandated by my university or 
from "clean" sites).

I have done a cursory check of the mozilla public lists but have found 
nothing of relevance.

Thanks for any insight.

Yasha Karant