270078 - Thunderbird hangs after local username change due to problem with profile

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Thomas S. Heydt-Benjamin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Hello!

I am running Thunderbird 0.9 (20041103), and was enjoying it quite a bit until I
changed my username today.

Windows 2000 SP4 build 2195

I changed my username in the normal way, and renamed my old (windows) profile as
well. All of my other applications work fine, but when I start Thunderbird I get
a mostly blank window divided into three frames, with Folders as my only menu
option. The application is mostly unresponsive to input except in a few weird
places (such as my ability to sort the empty mailbox by subject or sender).

It is clear that the difficulty is with loading my Thunderbird profile. I
experimented by renaming c:\documents and settings\myUsername\application
data\thunderbird to a different name. In this case thunderbird starts just fine,
except of course that I lose all my settings and saved email.

Thunderbird will also load normally if I run with the -p parameter, and create a
new profile.

How can I make Thunderbird recognize my old profile?

TIA!
---Tom

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Change windows username through user management MMC
2.Rename user's windows profile
3.Attempt to run Thunderbird

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird loads with the toolbar blank, the menu bar missing, and the main
three frames blank.  No error message is displayed.

Expected Results:  
If there is a problem with the profile it would be great if Thunderbird could
resolve this problem automatically.  If it requires manual intervention an error
message should be displayed explaining to the user what has happened, and what
steps the user can take to resolve the problem.  The application should not come
up with missing toolbars and menus.

Comment 1

[Thomas S. Heydt-Benjamin]

Thanks to some comments in the forum, I found a workaround, but the bug remains.

Workaround: If I do a global search an replace, replacing all instances of
oldUsername with newUsername in all text files in the Thunderbird directory, TB
no longer hangs.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

you changed your windows username? Yep, that breaks profile manager, which
doesn't store windows directory relative paths...

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> invalid  (should have been closed long ago)