Trying to achieve:

same firefox profile throughout tests

Problem:

Tests are spread over 30 different files, instantiating a selenium object, and thus creating a firefox profile, in the first test won't persist to the following test because the objects die once script ends IIRC
Can't specify profile because I'm writing a test suite supposed to be run on different machines   

Possible solutions:

Creating a selenium object in some common code that stays in memory throughout the tests. I am running each test by spawning a new python process and waiting for it to end. I am unsure how to send objects in memory to a new python object.

Any help is appreciated, thanks. 
edit: just thought of instead of spawning a child python process to run the test, I just instantiate the test class that selenium IDE generated, removing the setUp and tearDown methods in all 30 tests, instantiating one selenium object in the beginning, then passing said selenium object to every test that's instantiated.
You can specify the firefox profile while running the server itself. The command would look like
java -jar selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate "C:\Selenium\Profiles" where "C:\Selenium\Profiles" would be your path where firefox template files are stored.
Keeping Firefox profile persistent in multiple Selenium tests without specifying a profile