1. My spelling checker works and always has. The obvious question that arises is do you have a dictionary installed for it to use.

In the write windows while actually writing an email, right click and from the menu, select languages. Is there an language? try a different one. I am in Australia and find the Australian discretionary has never worked as advertised, but the US and British ones are fine for example.

2. The second part is about character encoding. Some years ago the internet engineering task force decided email would use utf. Up until that time ANSI was used. This is all good for most of us, but there are still those die hard fans of old software that insist that it is "fine". Then there are those English speakers, mainly from the US as they are particularly insular about language (given the Spanish speakers they have it is strange) so they continue to use the ANSI character sets. This is particularly with business enterprises which simply fail to understand the technology they are using. These are not necessarily small. Target had a huge hack because they did not understand at the board level where expenditure decisions are made the processes they were using. I never ceases to amaze me how many business people think they need no understanding of the technology to accept the lowers tender. That by the way goes for all things, not just IT.

Switching to UTF-8 seems to have solved that character problem. -Thanks! My old setting for Western ISO is probably very old, a holdover from Netscape and the browser wars probably. I have used Mozilla programs for a long time and before that Netscape. I never could stand IE or Opera and I don't trust Chrome any more than IE. -Someday I may try Ubuntu or something and ditch MS.

The spell check problem is not a dictionary problem. The checker does not always recognize words from typo's like 'w ord' when edited to recombine them at times or things like 'p[oint' from my shaky fingers or some call it 'fat finger' syndrome when edited to remove the '['. It seems to be an intermittent bug. Not too many years ago spellcheck would sometimes remove all the wavy red underlines in a line of text when one word was corrected. The spelling checker in Firefox and TB has been buggy on my machine for a long time but it did work flawlessly many years ago. I just can't remember how many years ago. Sometimes not all updates or changes are good. Alas, maybe I should dump all my email etc. and start off again with fresh installations for TB and FF. My installations are very old with settings transferred from Netscape to the old Mozilla browser and on into Firefox. Mostly the same situation for TB. Email backup programs in the past have made email into unreadable hash. I have not tried one in years. Some other old setting may be causing the spelling checker problems. Due to old age and a few strokes my brain is shot and I can't code or figure things out anymore so I have to rely on the younger and wiser folks. I don't do anything IT anymore either. It is difficult enough just trying to keep my computer running the best I can. I started with the internet when we used dial-up and 300 baud modems and dumb terminals ;)

It sounds like a clean reinstall of Thunderbird will help. I can give you easy to follow instructions for doing that if you like.

You would need to backup your mail just in case, so there is no way to lose it. You can do this manually, or try an e-mail backup program that I use which is free and works great. It can archive e-mail from various different e-mail programs, and it can also be used to export the archive to various different e-mail programs. It is easy to use, but powerful, and free. MailStore Home.

Thanks guys, I think clean installs would help. They are long long overdue ;) I will use that email backup program and back up my bookmarks also. I should edit my bookmark file also. Most of the bookmarks are decades old and totally useless now. My installs and settings are decades old, -just continually updated. Some configuration entries were made manually back in the dark ages. I have been at this since the 'browser wars' when every new .dll file provided by Microsoft included with every program for Windows 'broke' Netscape.

You both solved the problem! Thanks again!

I will let you know if I have any problems.