Thunderbird won't start

Submitted by speweywalshe on Wed, 2007-10-03 11:34.

Member's Forum

hi,

i'm looking for a little advice here from all you mac users. i haven't used a mac in about 12 years or something so i'm not too familiar with them.

a while ago a client was having problems with their email client, i think it was just called 'mail' i went around to have a look at it and couldn't figure it out at all, so i installed thunderbird as i'm familiar with it. everything has been working absolutely fine for about a year now until this morning when they called me to say that thunderbird just wont open at all. when they click on the shortcut nothing happens.

if that happened on my windows machine, i would just do a backup with mozbackup and reinstall thunderbird. it seems the profile folder is still there which is good, again if it was in windows i would just do a backup and reinstall thunderbird in the same place which would reinstall the software but leave the profile folder intact. does anyone know if this is the case on a mac as well?

any advice would be appreciated as i'm really in the dark here having no experience with how things work on a mac.

Has this person repaired

Submitted by natobasso on Wed, 2007-10-03 15:10.

Has this person repaired permissions on their machine? Have they updated their Thunderbird software lately or upgraded their OS?

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Powerpoint is not a design application

thanks for getting back to

Submitted by speweywalshe on Wed, 2007-10-03 15:28.

thanks for getting back to me. i don't actually have much info on what state their machine is in. i haven't seen it since i installed thunderbird on it a year ago and they are a 2 hour drive away so i cant just drop into them. i'd be surprised if they have updated anything on it at all.

i don't know what repaired permissions is, i assume it's administrative access or something?

sorry i don't have much information to be giving you, they are pretty clueless about computers and i think asking them questions won't get me anywhere. when i went into them originally i was asking them how things worked as i hadn't used a mac in so long and they couldn't give me any information, i just had to work it out for myself.

Repair

Submitted by natobasso on Wed, 2007-10-03 17:42.

Repair Permissions:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751

This needs to be done regularly, maybe once a month for best computer performance.

Boot in Single User Mode to repair if problems persist (type "fsck -f", no quotes, then reboot when process is finished):
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106388

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Powerpoint is not a design application

thanks for the info

Submitted by speweywalshe on Thu, 2007-10-04 10:41.

thanks for the info natobasso. i'm a little scared of mentioning any of that to them, i think they would actually soil themselves with fear. i think their knowledge goes as far as to start the computer, open an application and shut down the computer, anything else would be over their heads. i'll have to find a way to make it very simple for them.