470637 - crash loses profile in that registry.dat is lost, related to bug 231606.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[William L. Hartzell]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081217 SeaMonkey/1.1.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081217 SeaMonkey/1.1.14

IF the system crashes and SeaMonkey is open, upon chkdsk registry.dat file is deleted.  This causes the list of acceptable profiles for this stable branch SeaMonkey to not exist.  This is a new problem in that the stable branch of last summer did not have this problem.  I've seen reports that this is also happening on Linux.  One should note that all .dat files are showing this problem, including the ones in the former active profile.  They all have dates/times that correspond to start of SeaMonkey or first use of that profile.  It is related to meta-bug 231606.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Peter Weilbacher]

Thanks for filing the bug, Bill.

Hmm, the problem with registry.dat will probably not be solved any more, because it is solved in Toolkit where (IIRC) profiles.ini is only read on startup (while being opened read-only) and then closed again. And that is what SeaMonkey 2.0 will do, too.

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

First bug report of registry.dat corruption looks to be Bug 205120.
See Bug 392956 Comment #17 and Bug 392956 Comment #18.

There seems to be at least 4 kinds of phenomenon. See Bug 392956 Comment #15.
(Modified version of Bug 392956 Comment #15)
  (A) Loss of prefs.js file
  (B) Corruption(partial data) of prefs.js file
  (C) Doubled default profile ("default" & "Default User")
      (fortunately, not real data loss)
  (D) Loss/corruption of registry.dat. (this bug)
      Although possibility of profiles.ini corruption is far less than
      registry.dat, the possibility is never be ZERO. So loss/corruption of
      profiles.ini can occur too. However, no bug is found for profiles.ini yet.

See Bug 392956(for Thunderbird) and Bug 422447(for Seamonkey), which are to organize such problems.
See also Meta Bug 193638 (for tracking of bugs which reports above problems.) 
> Bug 193638 : corrupt or lost pref.js / startup configuration error
Setting dependency to Bug 193638.

(In reply to comment #1)
> the problem with registry.dat will probably not be solved any more

I absolutely agree with you.

> profiles.ini is only read on startup (while being opened read-only) and then closed again.

Default=1(indicator of Last used profile) and StartWithLastProfile=0/1 in profiles.ini is updated. So profiles.ini can't be said "read only". Therefore, even if possibility_of_profiles.ini_corruption is nearly equal to ZERO, possibility_of_profiles.ini_corruption=ZERO can not be true. 
It's the reason of Bug 392956 Comment #17 and Bug 392956 Comment #18.
Sorry but I don't know about "single profile" case. I don't know whether Default=1 is updated(even when not-altered) or not.

Comment 3

[Peter Weilbacher]

William, sorry that I misled you into filing this bug, I thought you were talking about .dat files _in_ the profile (like persdict.dat, virtualFolders.dat, or msgFilterRules.dat). But as reported it is clearly WONTFIX.