I finally took a chance with FF5.
FF has had a back and forth history. Some updates created massive havoc; others were great.
With FF5 I lost a couple of add-ons that weren’t that important. They seemed to have cured the severe memory hogging problem. I do like the SYNC feature — as now, I can sync passwords and bookmarks with my desktop and two laptops.
Also, Firefox 5 does load faster than previous versions.