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Fresh Thunderbird install hangs a few seconds after starting; what to do?

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by dirkriehle

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I just installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Thunderbird with it. I transfered all my old email and linked the profile.ini to my old profile. For half a day, Thunderbird worked alright. Now (next day), it hangs a few seconds after starting up. I can click a little, but then it freezes. I started thunderbird in --safe-mode from the command line, but this didn't make a difference. I didn't get a crash report, because it doesn't crash, it freezes. Freezing here means hogging the full CPU. Under Ubuntu the window gets grayed out. I can still force a quit (through the window manager or from the command line) and the rest of the system works fine. But Thunderbird itself, after another restart, still freezes. Any thoughts on how to debug this or what is going on? Thanks1

I just installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Thunderbird with it. I transfered all my old email and linked the profile.ini to my old profile. For half a day, Thunderbird worked alright. Now (next day), it hangs a few seconds after starting up. I can click a little, but then it freezes. I started thunderbird in --safe-mode from the command line, but this didn't make a difference. I didn't get a crash report, because it doesn't crash, it freezes. Freezing here means hogging the full CPU. Under Ubuntu the window gets grayed out. I can still force a quit (through the window manager or from the command line) and the rest of the system works fine. But Thunderbird itself, after another restart, still freezes. Any thoughts on how to debug this or what is going on? Thanks1

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I deleted the global-messages-db.sqlite file, which stood at 5GB, and it seems to be working for now. I still have the usual switch-over (old machine install to new machine install) problems with the filters not working well though, but that's probably a different support request. (Usually this sorts itself out when I touch the respective folders.)