Ask DC: Firefox update woes

I watched an episode of "The Dead Zone" last night on Tivo where Johnny, the psychic main character, was trapped in an endless loop of visions. Ever time he thought he had come out of one vision, he would realize he was still in a vision. He kept seeing the same events from the point of view of several different characters whose lives had become intertwined.

It was a bizarre episode, but it reminds me of what I'm going through with Firefox right now. I installed Firefox 2 RC1 with no problems. It even updated itself to FF2RC2 recently. But every view days it updates itself to...I may not be a math whiz but I'm pretty sure 2 > 1 for most values of 2 Firefox 1.5.0.7! I uninstall it, try (maybe unsuccessfully) to remove all traces, reinstall Firefox 2, and then a few days later I'm back to 1.5.0.7. It's like deja vu all over again.

I know at least one of the time warps was due to Google Updater. After installing FF2, the updater kept blinking at me that this great new version, 1.5.0.7, was available. Now, I may not be a math whiz but I'm pretty sure 2 > 1 for most values of 2. Finally it just insisted on installing the "update". It also installed the Google toobar for IE, which I didn't really want. After that, I disabled Google's automatic updates and reinstalled FF 2, thinking the problem was fixed. A few days later, I'm back in 1.5.0.7 land.

I tried running both versions from different directories for a while, one in "mozilla/firefox" and one in "mozilla/firefox 2". But a few days later, both directories contained 1.5.0.7. Hmm...

Now, normally I like it when a program keeps itself up to date, but this is ridiculous. Has anybody else run into this problem?