Problems with Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0

Last week, Firefox 2.0 crashed on my PC. At the time, I was copying and pasting some lines to a forum. My OS is Windows XP, Service Pack 2.

Within a few minutes after the Firefox crash, my Thunderbird 2.0 email client crashed, and when I reopened it, I had lost all the items in my Inbox, Sent box, etc. I tried to restore the items from the backup folder, but Thunderbird just couldn't restore them. Instead I got a message at the bottom of the pane, saying "Building summary file for mailbox..." , with a green dashed line slowly moving along the lower right of the pane.

When I reopened Firefox, I clicked on an email address at one of the web sites I visit, expecting to see the email client (Thunderbird) pop up with the address in the "To:" bar, but instead 50 Internet Explorer 7 browsers popped up, within two minutes. The CPU was running at 100% and my PC froze.

I rebooted the PC and ran McAfee anti-virus, rebooted again, and the same thing happened when I clicked on an email address on the web site!

Finally, I uninstalled Thunderbird, Firefox and IE 7. Then, using IE 6 (which I believe comes with XP), I downloaded and installed the latest version of Firefox(2.0.0.7), but re-installed an older version of Thunderbird, namely 1.5. This solved the problem of the 50 IE browsers popping up whenever I clicked on an email address on a web site.

However, Thunderbird 1.5 still can't restore the original email items.

Has anyone else had these problems?

Thanks in advance...