362071 - Seamonkey forgets some settings without warning or apparent reason

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Robert Persson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061029 SeaMonkey/1.0.6 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061029 SeaMonkey/1.0.6 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0

I started up SeaMonkey-1.0.6 a short while back and it had forgotten many of its settings, such as the custom homepage I had specified. Most seriously, it couldn't remember any of my mail settings, so that I would get a blank window and the mail account setup wizard when I tried to start up the mail client. This means that I will probably have to spend several hours sorting out the mess manually in order to get my mail back.

On the other hand some parts of my profile seem to be still in place, such as my bookmarks and the contents of my scrapbook.

All I am aware of having done between the last fully succesful restart and the first borked one was to install the Reminderfox extension. I first tried to do this as myself, but got a permission denied message, so I did it as root instead. When I restarted as myself there was no sign of reminderfox working. I then closed seamonkey, restarted it as root and foud that reminderfox appeared to be working. I then restarted as myself and it was at that point I noticed that things were seriously wrong (although they might well have been with the previous restart as myself).

I uninstalled reminderfox (as root, using mnenhy) but my mail etc. did not come back. I had been experiencing ropey behaviour for a while prior to this. For instance the Oak Vocabulary extension would not work, when it would work on other users' profiles, while I had been completely unable to remove the Leo Search extension using mnenhy, no matter how many times I tried, not even after I had disabled all other extensions (except for mnenhy of course), and I also found that if I tried to delete the leo search jar I got a big box at the bottom of my seamonkey windows which was empty except for a less-than and a greater-than sign, forcing me to reinstall leo search.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Comment 1

[Robert Persson]

My last paragraph was rather hard to read. Here is a better version:

I uninstalled reminderfox (as root, using mnenhy) but my mail etc. did not come back. I had been experiencing ropey behaviour for a while prior to this. For instance the Oak Vocabulary extension would not work properly, when it would work on other users' profiles. In addition I had been completely unable to disable or to remove the Leo Search extension using mnenhy, no matter how many times I tried. It would always reappear as an active extension every time I restarted the chrome manager. I was not even able to get rid of it after I had disabled all other extensions (except, of course, for mnenhy). Trying to manually delete the leo search jar file caused other problems.

Comment 2

[Robert Persson]

I have looked in prefs.js and found that all the mail settings are missing as well as some other settings, such as browser startup homepage and download directory.

I also found, although I don't know if it's at all relevant, that mozver.dat was uid root:root (instead of myloginname:myloginname).

Comment 3

[Florian Rittmeier]

I've got the same problem. Today I started Seamonkey 1.1.1 right after I logged on and noticed that all my mail accounts were gone. Then looked for pref.js and recognized that it was only 20 lines long and not containing any of my mail settings. This was the second time this happen, each time without doing any special things. Are there an read or write locks missing?

Bug 365158 and Bug 372527 focus the same problem. Perhaps someone with the appropriate rights can link them together.

Comment 4

[Peter Weilbacher]

It's not clear to me that Robert's and Florian's problems are really the same. Did Florian restart the machine in between? If so, a disk check could have removed some critical files.

For Robert's case it seems clear that the extension installation as root has done some damage, otherwise mozver.dat wouldn't have been owned by root. As all this happened a long time ago, I see no other way than to resolve as incomplete.
Robert: if you can make it happen again, please reopen the bug.