473742 - No RSS feeds are working, despite no change to config for several months

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 388919

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[andy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.43 Safari/525.19
Build Identifier: Version 2.0.0.19 (20081209)

I am not getting any updates to any of my RSS subscriptions, despite the fact that I know that these feeds work. I have not changed the feed details for a *long* time, and I can also prove that they are correct by pointing a broser at the relevant URL and see the downloaded XML document. This seems to be a feature of a recent update to T'Bird.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Configure a new RSS feed or use an existing feed.
2. Try any of the standard methods for getting a download - er.g. waiting, Ctrl-Shift-T, r Get All New Message menu option.
3.
Actual Results:  
Nothing gets downloaded.

Expected Results:  
List of new feeds should appear beneath RSS entry.

As I've already mentioned, this facility has worked fine for several years now, since the early days of T'bird.

Comment 1

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Is there anything in the Error Console on startup?

Comment 2

[andy]

Yes, several errors (sorry for not spotting these earlier).

Typical:

Error: not well-formed Source File:

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Andy/Application%20Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/4jqpodfc.default/Mail/News%20&%20Blogs/feeditems.rdf
Line: 1, Column: 1
Source Code:
^

On inspection, this file appears to be full of nulls, which is rarely a good sign :-{

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

The workaround is to delete the feeditems.rdf and possibly the feeds.rdf file(s).

Comment 4

[andy]

Already done - following the massive hint provided by your earlier comment. I actually deleted (renamed) the 'News & Blogs' profile dir and then re-entered the RSS subscription details.

I'm surprised this bug has been hanging around since 2007 though!