I would hate to be accused of beating a dead horse but maybe my age has
something to do with not being able to let you guys know what the
Thuderbird/Firefox problem is that I have been having.

Clicking on the link in TB does open the link in FF... It just doesn't bring FF
up in the foreground.

The link you sent me finally had some good information after I realized that I
had to register to read it...Told you it must be the age thing. Most of the
comments were on making the link work which is not my problem. They mentioned
altering a file wich looks a little like a registry file in windows but I have
no idea how to get there. The file is...

~/.mozilla-thunderbird/[profile_dir]/prefs.js file

As far as what you said about changing preferred applications by going to System
> Preferences > Preferred Applications in Thunderbird, I couldn't find that in
the upper menu.