[Intrepid] Thunderbird's main window is invisible

[BeArDy]

Binary package hint: mozilla-thunderbird

Using : Intrepid, Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (also happens with 2.0.0.17 and other versions)

After a reboot this morning, I encountered a peculiar problem upon loading Thunderbird. It loads but the main window never appears. TB still pulls down emails, rss feeds, etc. but the main window just refuses to appear. I use the FireTray extension to get mail notifications in the notification area and to minimise TB to there and that icon appears fine - this is the only visible indication of TB even being loaded. I have already tried removing and purging TB from my system and then reinstalling it, but that has no effect. I have also tried starting TB with a new profile by moving the ~/.mozilla-thunderbird folder out of the way to force TB to create a fresh one and that also makes no difference.

The only changes I have made to my system package-wise in the last 24 hours are that I installed a more recent version of SMPlayer than the one in the repositories (I used the one in ppa.launchpad.net/rvm). This also updated the Mplayer package to a slightly more recent version too. I have since purged the updated packages from my system and then purged/reinstalled TB (both v2.0.0.17 and v2.0.0.19) and still the main TB window remains invisible. I ran TB from the command line to see if any errors were generated, but alas, there were none. To all intents and purposes, TB appears to be running fine, just with one *tiny* problem. :/

Just to give you a little more background, I've had this problem once before, literally a couple of weeks after Intrepid first came out. I was having quite a few other troubles at the time (problems with other packages and major fglrx "hiccups") and this problem was the final straw. I reinstalled Hardy and stuck with that for just over a month to let things settle down a bit, then upgraded to Intrepid again and things have been fine since then. To this day, I still have no idea what triggered this problem the first time around, but going to the newer version of SMPlayer seems to have been the trigger this time. I really don't want to have to do a full OS reinstall just to get TB fully operational again as I really need it to be running all the time.

My extremely temporary solution is that I have a couple of VM's for trying out various things and I have TB running in one of those. This means that I can still read my mails, etc. in a guest VM and can play around with TB in the host to see if I can get it working again.

"apt-cache policy thunderbird" gives the following results :
thunderbird:
  Installed: 2.0.0.19+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
  Candidate: 2.0.0.19+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.0.19+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1 0
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/main Packages
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.0.0.17+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages

Hope this is all useful and many thanks in advance.

[Ken (kkinder)]

This problem began slowly for me; sometimes Thunderbird wouldn't restore/show, but I could kill it and start it again and all would be fine.

Now it's stopped starting for me entirely. I tried moving my .mozilla-thunderbird directory and starting it with -safe-mode to no avail. I'll still see it giving me little messages about it downloading mail, but won't show itself.

Weirdly, it will also show dialogs warning me about things like expired SSL, but alas, still no dice in actually bringing up the main window.

I'm at my wits end! I get up this morning and I can't read my email.

[Ken (kkinder)]

Update! In double monitor mode, where I have 2 screens, thunderbird wouldn't restore.

With one screen, it restored...

[BeArDy (don-megatron)]

Quick update : I've had this a few times now since I first posted this bug and there appears to be nothing consistent about it starting other than it sometimes happens after random system updates and won't be noticed until you next reboot.

I also have what appears to be a quick fix to get TB working again (at least on my machine). This is what I do to sort it out :

- Quit TB. Either by killing the process or if (like me) you have an icon in the notification panel, use that.
- Remove & purge the thunderbird and thunderbird-gnome-support packages.
- Re-install the thunderbird and thunderbird-gnome-support packages.
- And the final and most important step : Close everything down and reboot your machine straight away! Do not reload TB before rebooting as this sometimes seems to cock the whole process up and you have to go through removing and re-installing the packages again.

You're not going to know if any of this has worked until you reboot as whatever stops TB from drawing the main window persists until you've rebooted. Just killing TB's processes isn't enough. That was the main thing throwing me the first couple of times I encountered this bug. Once I noticed that you had to reboot before reloading TB it's become simple to fix. I've had it four or five times now since posting this bug report and whilst it's an annoying bug involving a reboot to fix, it has become relatively simple to remedy.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

On 04/07/2009 08:03 AM, BeArDy_666 wrote:
> Quick update : I've had this a few times now since I first posted this
> bug and there appears to be nothing consistent about it starting other
> than it sometimes happens after random system updates and won't be
> noticed until you next reboot.
>
> I also have what appears to be a quick fix to get TB working again (at
> least on my machine). This is what I do to sort it out :
>
> - Quit TB. Either by killing the process or if (like me) you have an icon in the notification panel, use that.
> - Remove & purge the thunderbird and thunderbird-gnome-support packages.
> - Re-install the thunderbird and thunderbird-gnome-support packages.
> - And the final and most important step : Close everything down and reboot your machine straight away! Do not reload TB before rebooting as this sometimes seems to cock the whole process up and you have to go through removing and re-installing the packages again.
>
> You're not going to know if any of this has worked until you reboot as
> whatever stops TB from drawing the main window persists until you've
> rebooted. Just killing TB's processes isn't enough. That was the main
> thing throwing me the first couple of times I encountered this bug. Once
> I noticed that you had to reboot before reloading TB it's become simple
> to fix. I've had it four or five times now since posting this bug report
> and whilst it's an annoying bug involving a reboot to fix, it has become
> relatively simple to remedy.
>
Does the problem stay fixed after reboot?
Is this a problem after updating Thunderbird with normal updates?
Does using a new profile fix this issue? [1]

[1] mv .mozilla-thunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird.old
Than run thunderbird again and set up one account and try to reproduce
it. You may have the above folder if not than it should be .thunderbird
instead of .mozilla-thunderbird

The above is for both of you.

  status incomplete
--
Sincerely Yours,
    John Vivirito

https://launchpad.net/~gnomefreak
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JohnVivirito
Linux User# 414246

"How can i get lost, if i have no where to go"
    -- Metallica from Unforgiven III

[HfX (krasnojarsk)]

I have similar issues, see
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbird/+bug/363983

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

does it work better when starting thunderbird with -safe-mode? If so, can you try to disable just FireTray extension in tools -> addons dialog and see if that helps?

[BeArDy (don-megatron)]

John : Yeah, the problem stays fixed after reboots. Well, until it decides to start acting up again. :/

Playing round with profiles doesn't make the slightest difference. One of the first things I tried to fix this was to move the entire .mozilla-thunderbird folder out of the way and start with a completely fresh profile, just in case it was an extension causing the trouble - it isn't because this still happens when there are no extensions loaded in TB. When creating a new profile, all the dialog boxes show up fine, but when that part finishes the main window still refuses to appear. So, as far as I can tell the profile and it's contents seem to have nothing to do with this bug. Once the main window starts doing the invisible thing, that's it until you remove/purge then re-install thunderbird.

Thing is, this doesn't happen after TB has been updated. It's always after some random other system component that appears to have absolutely no connection to TB is updated. And I do mean random because there appears to be no pattern to it whatsoever. It's never the same system components updating and it doesn't happen after every update that occurs because if it did, I'd be fixing this issue anything up to a dozen times a week when it only occurs once or twice a month. *Something* somewhere gets tripped up (apparently randomly) and then you've got no visible main window in TB after you next reboot/load TB. I haven't seen this happen (yet) when nothing has been updated since the last reboot.

As I said before, it doesn't matter which version of TB you use from the repositories. This has happened to me with every version of TB used in the alphas, beta, rc and final release of Ubuntu 8.10 (2.0.016 - 2.0.0.17 ?) and every version of TB since, all the way up to the current 2.0.0.21. As far as I can tell, this only happens in Intrepid. I went back to Hardy for a month or two at the end of last year because of this bug (and a few problems with other things) and it never occured there. I haven't used Jaunty much yet (and doubt I will - still far too unstable, really don't like some of the updated versions of programs, some things I use aren't in the repos any more, and I have a radeon 9600 and *need* the fglrx driver cos the open source one can't do what I need it to do), so I can't say if it happens there yet either.

HfX : Yeah, you seem to get the same thing I do. Have you tried my quick fix to see if it gets the main window to appear again? It works every time on my machine. Just make sure you quit/kill TB before removing and re-installing the packages and then reboot before you try to load TB again. Whatever it is preventing TB's window from displaying stays in memory until you reboot and reloading TB before rebooting puts you back at square one.

[BeArDy (don-megatron)]

Alexander: Tried all that ages ago. Makes no difference at all.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

The cure by purging sounds suspicious.

Please reproduce while running

 strace -f -eopen thunderbird &> /tmp/strace.log.txt

and attach that strage.log.txt file to this bug.

[Bermuda (bermuda9)]

Same problem here. Removing .mozilla-thunderbird doesn't help. I attached the strace log.
I suspect a multi monitor setting to be the cause of this bug.

[wrongmind (wrongmind)]

I had the same issue. The problem appears after setting dual monitor, I use fglrx driver. Thunderbird's main window didn't show up when I connected only one monitor. Then I noticed that fglrx driver set the virtual desktop size to the size of the two monitor configuration also when only one monitor is used. After setting the virtual desktop size correctly to the size of one monitor, the thunderbird's main window show up again.
I hope this could be helpful.

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner.
There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test the current Ubuntu development version (10.04). If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect 328608, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Ken (kkinder)]

I got an email asking me to try replicating the bug on Ubuntu 10.04; I cannot replicate it, although, it stopped happening after I reinstalled Ubuntu 9.10 this January after a hard drive failure. So that isn't a very good test anymore

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

If this works with Ubuntu 9.10 then we can close this bug.
Also Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) will be EOL by the end of this month.

On 21 April 2010 08:29, Ken <email address hidden> wrote:
> I got an email asking me to try replicating the bug on Ubuntu 10.04; I
> cannot replicate it, although, it stopped happening after I reinstalled
> Ubuntu 9.10 this January after a hard drive failure. So that isn't a
> very good test anymore
>
> --
> [Intrepid] Thunderbird's main window is invisible
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/328608
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

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[Ken (kkinder)]

I can't be certain it's fixed, because it stopped happening not after a 9.10 upgrade, but rather when I simply reinstalled my operating system. But since I can't reproduce it anymore, you might as well close it. Thanks for looking into it.