Thunderbird not displaying after MacOS update

[rec29]

Hi,

My Mac updated yesterday to High Sierra (MacOS 10.13.5).

Since then Thunderbird will not display/start up. I click on the link to launch it in the dock and it "bounces" up and down as if it is launching. It does this for quite some time (a few minutes), then stops.

No windows open. Right-clicking on the the icon in the dock shows Application Not Responding and allows me to Force Quit. Selecting Show All Windows gives a No Available Windows message (so it isn't just sitting in the background somewhere).

I have tried:

• removing from the dock and creating a new link there;
• uninstalling and installing from a freshly downloaded TB 52.8.0 dmg; and
• deleting the ~/Library/Thunderbird folder (nb a new one isn't being created).

Has anyone come across this, or have any suggestions that might help?

Any log-files I can review?

Thanks.

PS that "How many letters are there in Mozilla?" captcha question at registration/login is not good. Either the answer should be 7 or the question needs re-writing to be clear that it is asking about unique letters. I like to kid myself I'm not too dumb and it took me a while to get there.

[tanstaafl]

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thund ... uirements/ doesn't list support for any MacOS version higher than 10.12 but usually using a later version is not an issue. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1203027 talks about Thunderbird problems with macOS 10.13.3 that were resolved by rebooting. I haven't noticed any threads that would make me suspect there was a generic problem with MacOS due to changes they made such as different requirements for non-Apple application to run.

I suggest you try starting Thunderbird in safe mode (even though you already deleted the old profile) as that has some side effects besides disabling add-ons. You can hold down the Shift key when clicking on the Thunderbird icon to do that.

If that doesn't help see if you can run the built-in profile manager by passing a -p command line argument. It has far less requirements. That won't workaround anything but knowing whether it works might help troubleshoot what the dependency is. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_manager

[rec29]

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thund ... uirements/ doesn't list support for any MacOS version higher than 10.12 but usually using a later version is not an issue. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1203027 talks about Thunderbird problems with macOS 10.13.3 that were resolved by rebooting. I haven't noticed any threads that would make me suspect there was a generic problem with MacOS due to changes they made such as different requirements for non-Apple application to run.

I suggest you try starting Thunderbird in safe mode (even though you already deleted the old profile) as that has some side effects besides disabling add-ons. You can hold down the Shift key when clicking on the Thunderbird icon to do that.

If that doesn't help see if you can run the built-in profile manager by passing a -p command line argument. It has far less requirements. That won't workaround anything but knowing whether it works might help troubleshoot what the dependency is. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_manager

Thanks for the reply and suggestions.

I forgot to mention that I've already tried rebooting.

Starting in safe mode isn't working.

/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -profilemanager, with or without the -bin either isn't working or is taking a really long time.

[tanstaafl]

Unfortunately I don't have a Mac (so I know little about them or what problems Thunderbird has with that OS) and Thunderbird doesn't have a general startup log file. It mainly supports network (POP3, IMAP etc.) and database logging. Have you tried booting OSX's safe mode to disable certain drivers ? See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

You seem to be able to run Firefox okay. Frequently if its not a profile problem (and you deleted yours) if you can run Firefox you can run Thunderbird because the both use the same type of Mozilla toolkit library.

Does the OSX activity manager reveal anything unusual about Thunderbird while its struggling to start? Doing that would be much more useful if you've run it before so that you know what is normal but maybe you can tell if its caught it in some sort of loop. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questio ... pplication mentions several ways to monitor file i/o under OSX. You could at least check whether its read prefs.js.

[rec29]

I'll work my way through those suggestions and report back. Thanks.

[rec29]

I was unable to boot into safe mode - during the upgrade to High Sierra filevault was activated (I didn't get an option to decline it, possibly something our IT department has implemented) and this blocks safe boot.

I couldn't see anything obvious going on with activity monitor (very little thunderbird activity to monitor, a bit of RAM but not much else), or a couple of the options suggested in the stackexchange thread.

But, I note that Gimp and Inkscape are also not loading, so I've raised an issue with IT and will wait and see what they come back with.

[rec29]

I haven't heard back from the IT department yet, but...

This morning I had a problem in Matlab, the program itself ran but opening a help window (via right-clicking on a function and selecting the help option) struggled to open a window (it took a really long time, but did happen eventually). A web search lead me to an article on the matlab support pages which implied it might be do to with MacOS's language or region settings.

Anyway, I went to System Preferences > Language and Region where the region was set as "United Kingdom (Custom)". I changed this to United Kingdom from the dropdown list and closed the System Preferences dialog.

Thunderbird, Matlab, Gimp and Inkscape are all loading and, I believe, working fine again.

[tanstaafl]

Weird. What did you change from the normal UK settings?