Well, good news and bad news - the good news is that I've fixed this 
textual element invisibility problem that was rendering both Netscape 6 
and recent Mozillas unusable unless you can remember what every button 
and menu originally said.

The bad news is that I wasn't keeping track of how I did it, and so I 
don't actually have conclusive info on what it was that did it.

The story is:
I had Mozilla latest milestone, then the latest nightlies at the time.
I also parallel installed Netscape 6 release when it was released.
I then found that Netscape 6 had no mail/news label text on buttons, 
drop down menus, and various other items. I also noticed that Mozilla 
had a chunk of menus invisible in the middle - search, go, bookmarks 
were invisible, and the menu items inside were too, but the actual 
contents like the actual individual bookmarks etc were visible.

I went through new nightlies usually around a Friday.

I also noticed that I couldn't reply to mail, as the reply details and 
body were not appearing, and the body wasn't an active text field - I 
couldn't put a cursor in it and type anything. Bit of a drawback! Even 
on new mail.

This week I disinstalled Netscape 6 and put in a fresh nightly from a 
couple of days ago - no change - still unable to generate email.

I also switched off Adobe Type Manager (with all my Type 1 fonts 
installed). I thought as it was type related that this might have a 
bearing - it didn't - it's not related.

This morning I took the latest (30/11/2000) nightly, and saved the 
application data/mozilla folder with all my mail and stuff in it, to 
another drive. The latest nightly also exhibited this behaviour, but 
when I generated a new profile, it didn't. However, all my mail was in 
the old one, which did. So, I deleted all the profile stuff except files 
I could see had my mail data in, then gradually put back old file after 
old file until I could see all my account data back in mail/news.

So, I now have a Mozilla with all the menus, and all my mail data, and 
everything's okay. Unfortunately, I wasn't very methodical as usual, so 
I don't know which file was the culprit, but somewhere in the old 
application data/mozilla folder there's a file that's capable of making 
menus and buttons textual elements disappear. This really happened!

Cheers. Ian Tindale


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