A couple weeks ago, Thunderbird updated itself, and my email life went to hell. The screen kept going black. Often all the icons on the email folders were missing. I often had to minimize and reopen Thunderbird to see anything. I was killing it and restarting it maybe 8 times a day when it hung completely. It crashed itself, and sent error reports, maybe 20 times a day. Absolutely horrible. I finally found this article, that explains how to disable hardware acceleration: http://www.askvg.com/how-to-disable-hardware-acceleration-gpu-rendering-in-mozilla-firefox-4-0-to-fix-font-problem/ That worked. Apparently in one of the recent updates, Thunderbird turned hardware acceleration on, when for my system, it needed to be off. (I dimly remember turning it off before.)