294993 - blue screen of death when minimizing Thunderbird

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Ray Blaak]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

My Thunderbird (version 1.0.2 (20050317)) crashes spectactularly far too often -
BSOD!

I have an IMAP account (local intranet server) and a POP3 account (remote
personal email), active at the same time. Usually I work with the IMAP account.
The BSOD happens reasonably consistently when I open the POP3 account folder to
look for messages, then click perhaps on the inbox of the IMAP account, and then
hit the window minimize button.

So, I can avoid looking at the POP3 account, but now its happening when dealing
with the IMAP account alone. Sometimes it happens when I open the address book,
change something, close it, then quickly minimize the app.

Always it has to do with minimizing. I am guessing there is a conflict with
background file/folder updates and the minimizing code.

The funny thing is that this does not happen on my home PC (also Windows 2000),
or my wife's XP laptop.

I have tried to live with this, and do workarounds, but it is happening too many
times in the day. I am being forced to move back to using Outlook. Damn!

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. not applicable, due to unpredictable nature. see description
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
BSOD!

Expected Results:  
Not crashed. Or at least only crashed itself instead of taking the entire system
with it.

My OS version is Windows 2000, 5.00.2195, Service Pack 4.

I will look up my home version to see if there is any difference.

Comment 1

[Josh Birnbaum]

Try updating your video driver.  If that's not it, the BSOD might give a clue as
to which driver is the problem (this is one area where WinXP, with its online
crash analysis, really helps).

In any case, user-space apps cannot directly cause a blue-screen, so this isn't
a Thunderbird bug.  Marking invalid.

Comment 2

[Ray Blaak]

Should we be so quick to ignore BSOD crashes? Thunderbird is the only app ever
that has caused this on my machine. 

Sure the fault may be ultimately with the OS or its driver (user apps should not
be able to do this), but it still remains the case that Thunderbird is doing
something unusual, or else the crash would not happen.

I also realize that if this is hard to reproduce it is also hard to fix.

Comment 3

[Ray Blaak]

Also, the OS is Windows 2000. How can I get a crash description that is useful
to analyze?

Comment 4

[Josh Birnbaum]

Let me start with an aside: I had a certain Excel spreadsheet file a few years
ago, that when opened in a certain version of Excel, would lock the machine up
(it was totally unresponsive, I had to pull the power cord).  It ended up being
my video driver, which was only 6 months out of date.

So while I realize the temptation is to look at Thunderbird folks for support,
it's just happening to trigger a certain set of driver calls that end up
crashing the kernel.  Other than to say that the video driver is a good bet, I'm
not sure others here can do much to help you.

http://support.microsoft.com/ has some good information on blue screens.  Some
specific to certain driver issues, others more general on how to debug them.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Only kernel mode drivers and/or Hardware problems can cause a BSOD or complete
system freeze.
Thunderbird doesn't install additional drivers and it's only running in the user
Space. It's a driver or a hardware problem on your system and Thunderbird only
triggers this BSOD. This also explains why you see this problem only on one of
your systems.

verified invalid