Bad profile. Can not compose, reply or open many windows. Help menu missing. (bug 1211291)
A day after upgrading most of my companies computers to Thunderbird 38.3 (and firefox 41.0.1) Several users (including myself) are having a problem with our profiles.
No matter what mail folder we select on the main tab all we see is the "Thunderbird Mail" page, like you see if you select an email account name in the folder pane. I can right click on a folder and view it in another tab, but if I tell it to view in another window nothing happens. I can double click on an email to read it in another tab but not in another window. If I ask it to compose, reply or forward nothing happens. The Help menu is missing. I can view and edit "account settings" but not "options."
Creating a new profile, copying the Mail and ImapMail folders, as well as the .mab files and prefs.js to the new profile gets things up and running quickly, but it is still several minutes per client.
Anyone have any idea what is going on? This happened several weeks ago on two computers. It happened yesterday and today on about 8 computers, a day after I upgraded Thunderbird. All clients have multiple imap addresses, no pop.
This is on windows 7 in a domain environment using roaming profiles, but none of the users are moving between computers. I have kept the old profiles for testing purposes.
Modified by Wayne Mery
All Replies (8)
Just something to try.
On the toolbar 
> Options > advanced > general and toggle the hardware acceleration setting
Thanks for responding. It looks like that setting is disabled in a default install, and I have not turned it on. Can you be more specific? What do you expect this to accomplish? I can not access the options in an affected profile. Changing the setting in a non-affected profile and switching the profile has no affect. Are you suggesting I change the setting before the profiles go bad?
Reports indicate this is caused by the Calendar addon, in conjunction with version 38.3.0.
For Windows, 1. install older version from http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/38.2.0/win32/en-US/Thunderbird%20Setup%2038.2.0.exe 2. remove calendar addon, restart thunderbird 3. update thunderbird at help | About 4. reinstall calendar addon
Does that help?
And a question - do your users use the calendar addon?
Thanks. That would make sense as it started becoming a widespread problem after the Calendar started going out to everyone. It may be worth noting that It happened to one other user and me before version 38.3.0. I did have the lightning plugin. I do not know about the other user. It happened again to both of us with version 38.3.0.
Some users do use the calendar, so we have been enabling for everyone since it started being installed with Thunderbird by default.
I will try your fix on a few computers that have not had the problem yet, and 1 or two that have. I will respond again this afternoon.
Thank you for your info, Wayne. You are definitely on the right track . It seems Lightning 4.0.3 is the problem. I finally realized I just needed to delete the lightning add-on from %appdata%\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomstring.profilename\extensions\.
Do you know if there is a way to detect the add-on name and version from the extensions directory?
I should also mention that Lightning 4.0.3 does not seem to be distributed any more, even though it is listed as a stable version of lightning on their compatibility website.
Anyone also encounter this problem when updating to Thunderbird 38.4.0?