Linux Mint 6 first impressions

Installing a new release of Linux about every 6 months gives me a good excuse to back everything up, which is not a bad thing.
However I hate all the tweaking that is then needed to get everything back to **just right**.

So it was a pleasant surprise when I installed Mint 6 Felicia this past weekend. I was expecting my dual monitor setup to be a big pain in the you know what. But I have to say I was amazed at how easy it was. It detected my video card and I told it make a large desktop and voila!

I thought to my self 'Hmm.. that was easy ...almost too easy'.

My first impression was 'Cool, this has improved a lot since Mint 4,' which
had me going around in circles for several hours trying to get dual monitor support.

I then went to open Firefox. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing.

When I looked at the hidden .mozilla directory it had a lock and an X emblem on it and when queried it said root only. I found I could run it as a sudo user in terminal.

It took me a while. My solution was to add my user account by using the chown command sudo chown : .mozilla (and then all its subdirectories and file).
I also had the same issue with .adobe and .macromedia directories that prevented flash working.

I am now in the process of adding all those other tweaks, but in the back of my mind I am wondering how can some files become root? Why does this happen and would this happen again?
Should I reinstall over again while I have not got too much time invested in getting it **just right**?