Turn off McAfee from scanning the Thunderbird profile folders and from scanning mail. see if that helps. With McAfees poor history over the past year with crashes, slowness and tstemp errors I look at it first now.

I have been having this same problem: but it does not appear to have been due to my antivirus (Comodo). In my case the system is not just slow: the indexer seems to hang permanently. I suspected file corruption in one of my inboxes. But, whereas the Activity Manager gives the name of the sub-folder it is currently working on, it does not appear to report the name of the inbox.

So to trace the corrupt file I had to keep moving emails from my inboxes to sub-folders until the system was able to give me the name of the sub-folder it was working on. Then, by shuffling emails between folders, I was finally able to identify the offending message. This was extremely tedious and time-consuming, as I had to restart Thunderbird every time I did a reshuffle in order to re-initialise the indexing process. The culprit turned out to be a copy of a phishing email I had previously reported. I'm guessing it contained intentionally bad data that confused the indexing system.

However, it seems that this wasn't the only corrupt file: so I've yet to test all my other inboxes when I've got several more hours available,

A problem like this would be much easier to trace if the indexer always clearly identified which folder it was examining or attempting to index, e.g. by prefixing the inbox with the mailbox folder name. That way one could tell immediately which inbox or sub-folder was the source of the problem.

Kevin, do you have a copy of thte bad data that caused the problem, that we could use to reproduce and possibly fix the problem?

zm99, did you solve your problem? Was it the antivirus software?

Well, stopping the virus scanner did stop it originally. But the problem has returned even with the virus scanner off. Very frustrating. Makes me want to switch to another email program. I'll give it a little more time to see if it gets fixed.

zm99, 1. You wrote "thunderbird is indexing every time I click on a message". Is this a gmail account? And, is *exact* wording of the message you are seeing? 2. Stopping the scanner might not be enough, depending on what you are doing. Best to a) start *Windows'* safe mode with networking enabled - win7 http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Start-your-computer-in-safe-mode b) Still In Windows safe mode, start thunderbird in safe mode - http://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/safe-mode

Does problem go away?

Hi,

No it's not gmail (Brighthouse RR). I'll try Safe Mode as you suggested.

Thanks

Not any longer, I'm afraid. This was a month ago, so my memory of exactly what I did is now hazy. But my main concern at the time was to get rid of the offending email, which I deleted from the system. I then copied the good emails to a new folder and deleted the old one for good measure . I still had a copy of the old sbd folder: but I've just spent over an hour scanning it, and could find no trace of the original phishing email.

Ok. I rebooted to Safe Mode (win7-64). Started thunderbird in safe mode. Seems to be fixed. I've had no problems for about a week now.

Thanks for the suggestion.