How do I get Firefox to start up without trying to dialout? (Work offline setting is not saved on restart.)

Question

My home page is a local file. I do not want my browser dialing out at start up. It is hard to tell if there is a trojan or virus when it tries to dial out before I try to load a page. I turn off most automatic updates on extensions that have a setting for that. I do not have a problem editing a configuration file if needed.

Answer 1

Thanks, the-edmeister, that autodial-helper setting should solve the connection dialog. (I set it to false but haven't restarted yet.)
But the underlying cause will still be there, and it will do its thing if I'm already online. I could not track all the destinations, 2 show up only in firewall, one of those was UDP, but the other was TCP/IP I think (the firewall doesn't log every connection). Two other connections show up in my proxy log. One of those is a GET/POST of 106 bytes to ocsp.godaddy.com. It uses what looks like a unique ID called Etag. And it does this on every start up of Firefox. I can block that particular server, but it just gives the impression of behaving like spyware, which kills any trust I may have had. (I can remember not so long ago when well-behaved applications would not even check for updates without asking first.)
On a happy note, I went through most of my installed extensions, and most are not misbehaving. I uninstalled a couple that were and found a way to reconfigure another to get the info from a local file.