The crash reporter does not appear because it has not crashed. There have been reports of things locking up for up to 2 minutes, but no reports of crashes.

One thing that is worth checking is the size of your MAB files in your profile folder. (They are the address book files)

Help menu > Troubleshgooting information will get you to the show folder button to locate the profile.

Thanks, Matt, that is insightful. Yes, my MAB file is large because it has all my contacts in it. My abook.mab is about 10 MB. And locking up for two minutes when I start to type an e-mail address on the "To:" line is simply unacceptable. This problem is new with Thunderbird 31.0. Earlier versions never had this problem and my abook.mab was the same.

The correct behavior would be to give priority to the user's typing while looking up hints in the background, which is apparently what older versions used to do. But now, to completely lock out the user while searching for possible matches is simply wrong. And what's it going to do, anyway? If I type an "a" is it going to make me wait until it lists all thousands of names and/or addresses starting with "a" for me to choose from? If so, that is idiotic!

Matt, while I appreciate the insight, I can't mark this one "Solved."

10 Mb is sufficient space (without pictures of contacts) for more than 100,000 contacts. The storage format is text after all.

Two things, this will probably provide an instant boost.

Download the current nightly build and see if that improves things, and to what extent. it is here http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-central/thunderbird-34.0a1.en-US.win32.installer.exe

It will install as Daily, not Thunderbird and will use your existing mail profile. ( but it might be a good idea to make a backup of the profile, just in case something goes terribly wrong.)

A change was made in 31 that I am now aware of that modified the way addresses were searched. The change moved from "starts with" to "contains" a slower but far more useful search process really. Since then further work has been done to mitigate that speed issue and it is included in that nightly build. I am seeking real time success stories to convince the drivers to back port the fix to 31.1 when it is released.

I have not yet tried the monthly build but the behavior in 31.0 is so annoying I would call it a bug. Let's say I want to send an e-mail to my friend Carol. I open up a new message window and on the "To:" line I try to type "Carol." However, as soon as I hit the "C" Thunderbird locks up and ignores my futher typing. I wait two minutes and eventually it fills in the name and address of a different correspondent with "c" somewhere in their name.

Yes rich the slowness is a bug.

The change from "starts with" to "includes" is a deliberate enhancement and will not be changed..

The way it works in TB 31 is anything but an enhancement.

When I want to send a message to my friend Caroline, I open a new composition window and begin to type "Caroline". However, as soon as I hit the initial "C" Thunderbird locks up as it goes off to search my address book for names with "C" somewhere in them. When it finally returns, it displays the name of a family member whose surname is also "Pasco" because, after all, that contains a "C" somewhere in it. So then I have to start all over typing "Caroline."

About the only thing that helps (and I shouldn't need to do this) is to type "Caroline" elsewhere, copy it onto the clipboard, and then paste it all at once onto the "To:" line.

Whew.

In previous versions, I would type

megan<enter> ryan<enter>

And it would find via lookup and find the appropriate address book entry and fill it in, probably before I was able to hit the <enter> key

Now when I type fast, because of the delay, it does not auto fill. I now have to deliberately pause to wait. And in some cases, the first item in the list has changed because of the change from search at the beginning from search within?

Sometimes I wish that old functionality could remain while new functionality be introduced that is optional, especially when it's UX related and has pros and cons.

Was this deliberate change due to feedback in the user community, or just the whim of the developers?

No, I don't have a large MAB either. Like 45kb?