Cheers xocemp thought it was a bit annoying having to manually download Seamonkey et al unzip etc for each new release. Using Mint here so I'll try that later, thanks to Aragaorn also, openSUSE is on another partition so I'll make sure that updates properly.
saying that, i haven't noticed any speed change using firefox 3.5 in XP at work, good excuse to surf more
Cheers
Al