Thunderbird 45.8.0 was made End Of Life or EOL when Thunderbird 52.0 was released back on April 4, 2017. https://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/

If you have a Pentium 4 or newer Intel CPU then you would support SSE2. Since AMD CPU's did not support SSE2 until a bit later on (AMD CPUs prior to Athlon 64, such as Athlon XP) I'm guessing you have a rather old AMD CPU.

On upside Firefox on Linux still could run with old CPU's that did not support SSE2 until the Fx 53.0 and later Releases so one can use the Fx 52 ESR for a while until 52.9.0 out on June 26. Not sure if Thunderbird 52 on Linux will work in this case.

James said

... I 'm guessing you have a rather old AMD CPU.

Yup it's an old Semperon which is Athlon architecture. I always thought it was Pentium 4 compatible, but Semperons dont have SSE2. And its a Socket A - no AMDs with SSE2 for this slot were ever released! So whole new system. Obsolescence a decade before I knew it! Grrr

So I'm fishing for a resurrection on ver 48 branch...

I should add this is under Windows XP.. stop laughing!

The short answer is no.

But that skirts the issue of, do the crashes happeen in safe mode, and what are your crashes? (help > troubleshooting)

The crashes are not often and not always repeatable. The last one was deleting a folder via IMAP I/f to Outlook.com.

Prior to that it was crashing during a background sync as it started up, that repeated twice then stopped. I have a couple of other accounts going as well: IMAP to gmail.com and pop to ntlworld.com (ISP). So what bit blew up is anyone's guess. I'd blame Microsoft as a good rule of thumb for all issues in software!

can't really help you without the crash IDs. see previous instructions

Last 4 submitted crash reports ids:

Report ID Date Submitted bp-3740ae60-220d-4756-843c-529420180408 08/04/2018 13:56 bp-5bdd924a-daa3-42d8-a7db-a06a70180408 08/04/2018 13:54 d25efd7b-4732-491b-9a39-b58278d4f313 06/04/2018 16:50 248b5ac1-ee27-482a-9603-90b7e2835367 06/04/2018 16:49 ...

not quite sure I submitted all crash reports but the last two pairs of reports seem to be crashes while background syncing followed by restart followed by another crash and restart it seems.

It seems I didn't report the folder delete crash.

If u can offer advice then thanks.

Thanks for the info, but sorry no advice. The crashes don't point to an obvious cause

js::TraceRoot<T>  bp-3740ae60-220d-4756-843c-529420180408
fast_path_fill  bp-5bdd924a-daa3-42d8-a7db-a06a70180408

But surely you can pick up a more modern machine, even used, for $50-$100