Mozilla apps won't start

[Jim Byrnes]

Yesterday I had Firefox3.6 and Thunderbird3.01 running on my Ubuntu9.10 
amd64 machine. I had java plugin issues with Firefox and ended up 
re-formatting and reinstalling Ubuntu.

I downloaded the Moz files and extracted them to /home/<me>/firefox and 
/home/<me>/thunderbird. If I go to the file browser and double click 
their shell scripts a dialog box pops up and I choose "run". I see a 
little disk activity but nothing else happens.

If I open a terminal and type:

:cd thunderbird/thunderbird
:~/thunderbird/thunderbird ls

I get a listing of the directory including run-mozilla.sh, thunderbird & 
thunderbird-bin

If I do:

:~/thunderbird/thunderbird$ thunderbird

I get:
The program 'thunderbird' is currently not installed. You can install it 
by typing: sudo apt-get install thunderbird
thunderbird: command not found

They were running yesterday but not today so I must be making some kind 
of basic mistake and would appreciate some help again.

Thanks,  Jim