I use the tarballs. They unpack and they are ready to go. You have to organise plugins, file associations and menu shortcuts yourself but that's about it.

I'd agree that you could think about a newer version of Mandriva. 2006 is far from being their best work but 2007 is not that far away.

These are two pages explaining plugins for Firefox:
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/firefox-linux.html

After fighting with 2006 for two months and developed many problems I reverted back to 10.0 last week. I've not found rpms for either that work well anywhere. I've downloaded the tarballs from Mozilla. It's not really hard to integrate. If you setup your own menu after install it isn't much harder. Just (as root) copy the firefox or thunderbird directory extracted from the tarball to the /usr/lib dir. You can click on the tarball in Konqueror and just copy the dir out. And then make a link of the firefox or thunderbird executable files to /usr/bin and then make your menu entries. Oh and copy the icons from either to the /user/share/icons dir. I've got both 1.5 versions working fine in 10.0. Hopefully 2007 will workout the kinks 2006 had.

Thanks for your help. By the sound of things I might wait for 2007.