I've been doing a load of additional research on this bug because it's causing me daily annoyance...
In response to Sandy Knight: This issue will not corrupt your profile. I've hooked up gdb to thunderbird and in combination with the source code and a bit of a crash course in reading c++ I feel I know much more about the problem... 1) If my interpretation of RFC2396 is correct, then although a string like "GMT+00:00" looks obviously like a Time Zone and not a URI, it does actually match the regex for a URI schema, which is why a call is made to gconf to look for a handler. 2) GConf does not accept '+' in the names of keys or directories. This means that gconf is technically unsuitable for mapping URI handlers, except that I can find no examples of a real-world URI 3) Since at least Thunderbird 10.0.1 (and I believe much older), "GMT+00:00" would be parsed as a URI and checked with gconf. The error message "Bad key or directory name: "/desktop/gnome/url- handlers/GMT+02/command": `+' is an invalid character in key/directory names" has been around/happening for a very long time. 4) Important difference: - The x86_x64 binary release of Thunderbird 14.0 ( ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/14.0/linux-x86_64/ ) does not show popup a dialog when the error occurs - The Ubuntu 'thunderbird_14.0+build1-0ubuntu0.10.04.1' package *does* show a popup when the error occurrs. 5) I tried diff'ing the source trees of the Ubuntu TB 14.0 source and the Mozilla TB 14.0 source and I can find no significant differences. So I think the problem is introduced dependant on how the package gets built. 6) The error message "An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for %s. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly." is generated by the gconf global default error handler defined in libgnomeui/gnome-gconf-ui.c **AFTER** Typing all the stuff above I decided to try diffing an 'lsof' of good and bad examples of thunderbird running. One significant difference I noticed is that the Ubuntu package is using GIO libraries whereas the Mozilla package is not. In the config help the default is GIO-disabled: "--enable-gio Enable GIO support (default: disabled)" I can now see that in fact when thunderbird triggers a pop up it is when it is using GIO and not GConf. I got confused for quite a while until I looked at the implementation of g_app_info_get_default_for_uri_scheme which ultimately uses GConf to obtain the information. Right now I'm taking a guess that the reason this error appears as a popup in the GIO implementation is because it does not catch and return the error unlike the gconf implementation in Thunderbird. The default error_mode is GCONF_CLIENT_HANDLE_UNRETURNED, which I'm now taking to mean "Only use the default handler for errors which haven't been returned" (thus a pop-up as defined in libgnomeui). I'll keep looking at this when I have time... Possible Workarounds: ----------------------- To avoid the problem (at least on a Ubuntu host,) you can use the Thunderbird binaries supplied by Mozilla Or You could rename/move the /usr/lib/gio/modules/libgiogconf.so file so that Thunderbird can't find it. WARNING: I don't know if this is critical to other applications - rename it at your own risk and be prepared for other applications to break. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to thunderbird in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/411358 Title: Thunderbird2 gconf gmt problem 'Bad key or directory name' because of plus symbol (+) Status in Mozilla Thunderbird Mail and News: Confirmed Status in “thunderbird” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Here is an error message for Thunderbird 2 in Jaunty gnubyexample@k8amd:~$ thunderbird GConf Error: Bad key or directory name: "/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/GMT+02/command": `+' is an invalid character in key/directory names gnubyexample@k8amd:~$ date;uname -a;cat /etc/*version*;dpkg -l | grep underbird Sun Aug 9 14:48:37 BST 2009 Linux k8amd 2.6.28-14-generic #47-Ubuntu SMP Sat Jul 25 00:28:35 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux 5.0 ii enigmail 2:0.95.7-1ubuntu2 Enigmail - GPG support for Thunderbird ii thunderbird 2.0.0.22+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1 mail/news client with RSS and integrated spam filter support ii thunderbird-locale-en-gb 1:2.0.0.14+1-0ubuntu2 Thunderbird English language/region package From reading this extract ( http://osdir.com/ml/os.solaris.opensolaris.desktop/2008-03/msg00020.html ): Subject: Re: GConf/Thunderbird error on Solaris Nevada "Hi Mats,I believe you download the contribute builds of Thunderbird 2, and run it on snv_70. For some reason, the fix is upstreamed to Thunderbird 3 alpha, but not community version of Thunderbird 2. Fixed in snv_68 means the fix was integrated to Thunderbird bundled with snv_68." ...it seems that the fix for this in thunderbird2 might require some manual intervention as although the problem is well know, the fix was only incorporated in the newer thunderbird3. Have just checked the Karmic version at: http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/thunderbird which currently shows that version 2 of thunderbird is planned for Karmic release. As thunderbird3 is at Beta 3 right now I can perhaps see why debian and ubuntu are sticking with Thunderbird2 just now. http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/about/press/archive/2009-07-21-01 However it does seem a shame to ship a new release with this known gconf issue unpatched. 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