Ivan Berger wrote:
I'm running SM 2.33.1 under Win 7 Pro x64.
At the moment, I have problems with SM: The mail side forgets the
passwords for two of the mailboxes it handles, and fails to recognize
some of the brief nicknames I use for addresses I frequently mail to.
Andthe browser won't let me log into some perfectly legitimate sites.
(If I make SM my default browser, it keeps looping me back to the log-in
page; otherwise it takes me to my default browser, where I can log in
readily.)
I am about to reinstall my OS and all my software on a larger, faster,
drive. Will this cure these problems? And how do I have the new
install access my mail settings and files without bringing them back?
I don't believe that a reinstall will help you, unless you have concrete
reason to believe that there's corruption to program binaries, or to the
Windows registry. In Windows 7, my experience is that either of those is
*very* unusual.
The problem is far more likely that there's something amiss in your
Seamonkey user profile. And if you copy the profile to a new machine,
chances will be high that you see the same symptoms.
First thing to check is Safe Mode (Help -> Restart with add-ons
disabled). Although the wording indicates that the focus of this one is
to disable all your extensions (if any) quickly, it also causes
Seamonkey to start with default settings for all user preferences.
If things behave correctly in Safe Mode, then it's a pretty good
indicator of something amiss in your profile, probably in your prefs.js
file.
If you have only a few extensions installed, reenabling them one by one
(and restarts in-between) can help you find which extension is causing
problems. Once you find that extension, you can uninstall (and
optionally, reinstall). If you have a lot of extensions, disabling half
of them is a good place to start. If no problems, reenable one at a time
(with restarts), until the problem appears. If problems persist, keep
disabling extensions until the problem goes away.
From my own experience, I've found that sometimes a simple restart in
Safe Mode, followed by a restart in Normal Mode can be enough to clear
problems (e.g., something wonky in prefs.js).
If Safe Mode doesn't isolate the problem, then the direction you
probably want to go is to move all your data to a new profile. For
browsing, it's not too difficult to copy the most essential data from
one profile to another -- that would be your bookmarks, and probably
your password store. For mail, there's a little more, namely your
address book, and the Mail sub-folder.
Personally, I'd probably re-configure mail accounts by hand, and also
manually reinstall extensions. If your password handling isn't quite
right, I might also advocate making sure you have that information saved
elsewhere, and manually re-enter your login credentials.
If you're just moving a profile to a new machine (or a new
installation), it's easy enough to do that. Install Seamonkey on the new
installation, and let the setup wizard start, so that a profile is
created (and then abort). From there, copy the contents of
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Seamonkey\Profiles\[random].default to the
corresponding location on the new installation. Some will advocate that
you edit your profiles.ini file, to ensure that the name of the profile
folder is identical, and that pointers are correct, but I've never had
problems copying the contents of the profile folder, even if the folder
names aren't identical.
Or you can also use the MozBackup utility -- it works fine for creating
archives of profiles, and you don't have to go digging to find the
necessary locations in %APPDATA%. It's ideal for moving a profile to a
new computer.
Smith
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