480309 - Unintuitive messages when starting with a non-existent profile directory

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 367609

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Joel Goguen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009020519 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090220 Lightning/1.0pre Shredder/3.0b3pre

If you have a profile which refers to a non-existent profile directory, the error messages are not intuitive.  For example, if profiles.ini contains the following:

------------------------------8<-------------------------------
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=3yt5q2x7.default
Default=1

[Profile1]
Name=foobar
IsRelative=1
Path=35l08sbb.nosuchdir
------------------------------8<-------------------------------

If you then start thunderbird with 'thunderbird -P foobar' the error message is:

------------------------------8<-------------------------------
Thunderbird is already running,but is not responding.

To open a new window,you must first close the existing Thunderbird process,or restart your system.
------------------------------8<-------------------------------

If instead you start Thunderbird with 'thunderbird -ProfileManager' and choose the foobar profile, the error message is instead:

------------------------------8<-------------------------------
Thunderbird cannot use the profile "foobar" because it is in use.

To continue,close the running instance of Thunderbird or choose a different profile.
------------------------------8<-------------------------------



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a profile but do not create the associated directory
2. Start Thunderbird as described
Actual Results:  
The errors shown above are displayed

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should instead state that the profile directory does not exist, and either offer to create it and start the new account wizard, or fall back to the Profile Manager so a different profile can be selected.