The reviewer who approved CoLT over at the official Mozilla add-ons site pointed me to a helpful XUL element: prefwindow. This element, along with several other related ones, makes handling extension preferences super easy. Way back when I first started writing extensions (back in the Firefox 1.0 days), this mechanism wasn't available. For some reason, it slipped by me when it was introduced in 1.5.

I may try to replace my preference-handling code in both CoLT and Googlebar Lite with this method. Doing so should simplify my code considerably, reducing the footprint of each extension in the process. Making these updates will take time, but I think the end result will be worth the time investment.