Comment 35 for bug 411358

This looks like this may be a regression now as it was first reported over two years ago and I've never hit the problem until a recent update to Thunderbird 13.0.1 which has broken both of my laptops in the same way (both running 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)
The actual ubuntu package is 13.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.10.04.1 from the 'lucid-updates' repository.

The format of the emails I receive has not changed in a very long time and they used to open fine. I receive frequent internal bug updates by email which contain lots of timestamps in the text like:
"*** (#1 of 1): 2012-05-24 15:37:20 GMT+00:00 <email address hidden>"

As soon as I open any of those emails I get an unlabelled popup dialog which states:
"An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for thunderbird-bin. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly."
Clicking on [Details] gives multiple instances of the following error:
"Bad key or directory name: "/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/GMT+00/command": `+' is an invalid character in key/directory names"