[OT] Thunderbird 3 vs. 2

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:08:32 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

>
> NEWSFLASH
>
> I swear that right after I sent the message above, I clicked "OK" to  
> download "ALL" those 3 messages and the next thing I saw was this (I  
> wish I was kidding):
>
> http://erdani.com/opera-crash.jpg
>
> It's not impossible the code that handles the "All" download assumes the  
> actual number of messages is greater than 250...

I'm going to go ahead and suggest you reinstall opera :)

I've never had near the problems you did.  That error message box may have  
been triggered in a weird state anyways, notice the <2> at the top.

A related experience:

I recently was forced to purchase a new computer after my XP machine  
died.  It happened to be right when Windows 7 came out, so I got one of  
the first compaq's that had Win7 on it.  After learning how the UI had  
been improved I was excited to start using it.

Several days into it, I started getting many bizarre errors.  First, it  
said really scary stuff like "could not mount \HardDrive\0".  Then it told  
me my hard drive had corruption on it, and chkdisk should be run (chkdisk  
never found any errors).  Then I set up a backup for my data, worried I  
was going to lose it all.  The backups worked at first, but sometimes  
would hang the entire OS because the "volume shadow copy" failed.  I  
called compaq to try and straighten it out.  I ran all requested hardware  
diagnostic tasks, and they all passed with flying colors.  They asked the  
question (I kid you not) "have you altered the software on the system at  
all."  They had me try removing my USB attached hard drive for a few days  
(of course this cleared up the backup hang problem because there was *no  
media to backup to*).  I still had issues, and finally they had me  
reinstall the OS from recovery disks.  During the hour-and-a-half process  
to reinstall the OS and test and see that there were no immediate  
problems, the technician mentioned that others have had similar issues and  
a reinstall fixed the problem (AAAAH!! Thanks for telling me that right  
away!)

Since the reinstall, everything has worked very smoothly, my backups never  
fail, and the system seems very stable.  There was absolutely nothing  
wrong with the hardware, despite all the issues with hard drives, it was  
simply a corrupt first install.

Moral: always run the recovery as the first thing you do with a new PC,  
because the first install usually comes from a factory image, and is not a  
"fresh" install :)

-Steve