717899 - Thunderbird hangs during virus scan

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1
Build ID: 20111220165912

Steps to reproduce:

Automatic virus scan ran overnight.


Actual results:

Thunderbird would not respond during virus scan or afterwards when virus scan completed.  It does this a lot.  Today both thunderbird and firefox did this and firefox still won't come up.


Expected results:

I should have been able to bring up thunderbird despite the virus scan in process on a 4 core pentium processor with plenty of memory.

Comment 1

[[e-mail]]

This is a continuing problem over more than one version of Thunderbird.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

your AV software is most likely scanning Thunderbird's profile directory - which it should not be doing.  see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Antivirus_Related_Performance_Issues

scanning of the profile directory can trash thunderbird performance, and can also cause you to lose valid messages.

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

Wayne,

I have seen references to stopping the AV software from scanning the profile directory.  There are provisions for doing this.  Also for a simultaneous problem I am now suddenly having with FireFox which had not recently been giving trouble in this latest version.  Does this not open me up to virus threats hanging out there?  I 'live' on my computer as I administer a BB and a Wiki, have to check out links provided so I have to have protection.  These programs were 'asleep' with their windows minimized and nominally just the AV running when this happened.  They would just not wake up when needed again.

Ted Vollers

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

>  Does this not open me up to virus threats hanging out there? 

not as far as I know. for even more info see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Antivirus_software

last fall iirc there was a rash of problems with Tbird and Fx caused by AV software. I don't recall which one, but Roland might remember.

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

It was originating in a hardware problem but only showed up in Thunderbird and occasionally Firefox.  Then the video card finally showed clear malfunctions and was replaced.  My apologies for confusing the issues but when the only programs giving problems are TB and FF, that seems to be a clear indicator that they are involved.  And somehow, they were the only programs vulnerable to the problem.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

thanks for the update