196302 - Attachments, although present, are not shown in the message pane or header pane. Other symptoms include address books disappearing and blank windows when opening a message in a new window

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 196303

(MailNews Core :: Attachments, defect)

Description

[Matt Claridge]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; RedHat Linux 7.1) Gecko/20010110 Netscape6/6.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; RedHat Linux 7.1) Gecko/20010110 Netscape6/6.5

After upgrading to Mozilla 1.2.1 from either Netscape 6.2 or Mozilla 1.0,
everything works fine for a couple of days and then these symptoms appear
simultaneously: attachments are no longer visible either as paperclips in the
header pane, or at all in the message pane; address books and especially address
lists disappear (although the files themselves are still there and readable and
prefs.js still points to them); when you double click on a message to open it in
a new window, the resulting window is completely blank, even though the message
was perfectly readable in the original message pane.

The problem is DEFINITELY related to the preference files although I can't pin
down which one - but two profiles on the same PC will not necessarily both show
these symptoms. Upgrading to Mozilla 1.3 does NOT fix the problem. Deleting the
contents of the profile directory and recreating the preferences from scratch
fixes the problem TEMPORARILY, but the symptoms come back within a few days. It
appears that maybe Mozilla is doing something to the prefs that is corrupting
them possibly? It is possible to 'fix' (or remove) the problems by downgrading
to Netscape 7 or Netscape 6.2, so it appears to affect only the 1.2 and 1.3
branch of Mozilla.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Take a Windows 98 PC running Netscape 6.2 or Mozilla 1.0.x (I can't test with
any other versions)
2. Do a standard installation of Mozilla 1.2.1, letting it convert and use the
existing profile
3. Check that Mozilla starts and works ok, which it should.

Actual Results:  
Within a few days (might be longer if it doesn't process as much email as ours
do) the first symptom you'll notice is that all evidence of attachments
disappears. Check for the other symptoms and they will be apparent also.

Expected Results:  
It should have just carried on working...

- We use the default theme
- Mozilla profiles are, and have always been, stored on a network share
(permanently mapped to the client PCs)
- We use a read-only user.js file to fix certain prefs (but we have tried
removing this to get around the problem, as described above)
- Previous upgrades from Netscape 6 to mid-branch releases of Mozilla have gone
without a hitch

Comment 1

[Matt Claridge]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 196303 ***

Comment 2

[Vedran Miletic]

v