I hit a brick wall again -- sometimes, the window needs to be resized to
be _so_ wide, that Mozilla won't allow it (max width allowed seemingly
being close to my screen width, which is 1600 pixels).
I found that the bug I'm experiencing is very much tied to the "blinking
redraw" bug I mentioned earlier (which is so bothersome in its own right
as to make mail/news nearly unusable).
But, the good news is that I think I've got a workaround for both bugs
now: Don't have your mail headers showing!
Yes -- that's the _real_ bug, I now see. Moz is getting all confused by
super-wide header fields, typically the Path field. It's insisting on
making the window wide enough to display the Path field on one line.
When you click on a new message, Moz seems to calculate a new width for
the viewer pane, to make it wide enough to accommodate putting Path on a
single line. It then blinks rapidly between the old width and the new
one, until it finally (after 10-20 tries) settles on the new one.
However, the window itself is not resized -- only XUL's interpretation
of the width width is. That is, when the window is resized to a wider
width than the current window, XUL puts the scrollbars outside of the
viewable pane. If you can resize your window to be wide enough, you can
see the scrollbars again. If the Path is extremely long, then XUL's
notion of the window width is wider than the widest you're allowed to
make your window, in which case you can't retrieve the scrollbars at all.
So, again -- the workaround is to not view the headers!
- Chuck
