Thunderbird crashing on start up

Posted on   August 12th, 2010

Thunderbird has always been my favourite email reading program, though lately it seems like every time I upgrade to its new version something bad happens. This time the program would not start anymore. The icon shook for a while, the white light lingered some seconds, and then it faded away. Even if I rebooted my computer it wouldn’t work, neither would if I regenerated the preferences file ~/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.thunderbird.plist.

This is how I fixed it, in case it is useful to someone else. I’m running MacOS Snow Leopard 10.6.4 on a Macbook Pro:

First I created another profile for Thunderbird. The profile manager is launched by this command [you must type this in your terminal]:

/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -profilemanager

Now starting with the other profile it worked just fine, so I figured it must have been something on my profile that got corrupted in the upgrading process. What I did next was to copy all the files in my old profile folder to the new one. Remember that the profiles are stored in the folder ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/ [the ~means the home directory]. In this process I realised what was the problem: the file compreg.dat.

Usually this file regenerates itself with the new configuration, but for some reason this time did not. So all I did to fix the problem was to replace this file for the new one of the new profile. And that was it, it worked again! You can also copy all your folders and files of the old profile to the new one except for this single file. Be aware to make backups of the folders before trying anything, or you will loose all your mail data.

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