190573 - abook.mab mysteriously corrupted, crash in Compose clicking 'Address' or File\Save

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 136963

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Address Book & Contacts, defect)

Description

[dirtyoldm]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212

Suddenly these 3 actions cause Moz to lock up immediately:
While composing an email, clicking Address or File\Save
In the browser, right-clicking a .JPG and clicking 'Properties'

Heroic sleuthing reveals ABOOK.MAB compared to yesterday's backup has these 24
bytes added at the very end:
..@$${16B{@..@$$}16B}@.. (double dots are 0D 0A).

Restoring ABOOK.MAB from backup fixes all three (yes, Properties in the browser
too).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Can't be sure what caused it, but it happened twice in a week
2.No changes were made to addresses, tho the Adr Book was used on several emails.
3.
Actual Results:  
See 3 things causing Moz to lock up in 'details' above

Expected Results:  
Er, well... no crash!



Prior versions never did this, and this 1.3a had been working fine for many days.

My Profile was moved to a non-standard path per the hints at 
http://home.earthlink.net/~irwingreenwald/Profile.html

Tried to install the latest nightly build just now, but the install crashed with
an 'Illegal Operation' error at the end and Moz then crashed when loading, just
after the splash showed.  Had to restore from earlier.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

-> AB

Comment 2

[dirtyoldm]

Further experiments indicate the problem is a bit more complicated.
48 bytes are appended to ABOOK.MAB every time it is used to address an email.
The update occurrs when Moz closes.
This usually does not cause a problem, though the address book is slowly
growing.
When the problem occurred, only 24 bytes were appended.

It would be helpful if someone would document the arcane characters in this and
other Moz files, perhaps in the files themselves.

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

[e-mail], are you still able to reproduce this problem with a clean
profile on Mozilla 1.7 beta or newer? I cannot reproduce any similar problem
with Mozilla 1.7 beta.

Comment 4

[OstGote!]

Old version, no further responses. Resolving.

See Bug 93932 and Bug 136963 for a better handling with corrupted ABs.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 136963 ***