Firefox won't open now...

hi all. i used carbon copy cloner to make a backup of my 10.4.1 system 
on an external firewire hard drive. now, firefox will not open. a 
previous backup was with 10.3.4 and firefox worked fine when booted from 
the external hard drive. the only other app that did not work was image 
capture and i drag copied it from my main hard drive to the external 
hard drive and it then worked. i tried the same thing with firefox and 
it did not work. it will bounce once in the dock then quit. i then tried 
downloading a developer optimized for G4 powerbooks and it will launch, 
bounce the icon, stop, and hang with the application in front but no 
window displayed. i backed up the .default folder, tried deleting it to 
see if it would help but it still hangs. repaired permissions on the 
volume, nothing so far has worked. the identical config works when 
booted from the main hard drive. any help will be greatly appreciated.