I was having trouble with unread mail messages being shown on the welcome screen of Windows XP after using Thunderbird Portable.
Two related forum articles are here and here.
I found that the launcher correctly backs up the UnreadMail key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail) and any subkeys it has unless the UnreadMail key itself does not exist. In that case Thunderbird Portable will leave data behind.
Please fix this. (This still happens with the latest version - 2.0.0.17).
[Subject modified by mod JTH]
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I think it backs the key up IF it exists so it doesn't mess with a possible local install. Thats the way it should work.
Just delete the key manually.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
When the launcher checks for the UnreadMail key at the start, it backs it up if it exists and restores it at the end, but if the UnreadMail key doesn't exist at the start then shouldn't the launcher delete it again at the end?
Otherwise, Thunderbird will create the UnreadMail key and and a subkey inside it and then just leave it there at the end. Then whenever you run Thunderbird after that, it will back up that data correctly.
The only reason this is a problem is because the public computers that I often use Thunderbird Portable on have never had an email client run on them before, so they don't have an UnreadMail key on them (I just checked) and it is kind of annoying to have to manually delete the subkey with my data each time I use one of the public computers.
to the Launchers source code, it does delete the UnreadMail key.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Then I don't know what is going wrong for me. I know that I am using the latest version of Thunderbird Portable, I am using the launcher, Thunderbird never crashed while I was using it, the account I was using did have permission to read/write to the registry, but the key was still not getting deleted at the end (this happened on more than one computer too)
I'll post again if I find anything
Using ProcMon, I monitored what the launcher was doing to the registry when I closed Thunderbird, 2 times - once when the UnreadMail key did not exist and once when the key did exist (with no subkeys)
When it didn't exist, just two events were logged - both attempts to read the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail-BackupByThunderbirdPortable key. Of course the result was name not found. Since the app logs failed read/write attempts as well as successful, it seems the launcher never tried to delete the UnreadMail key.
When it did exist, it also tried to read that key but was successful and then continued to restore the UnreadMail key from the backup key. (During the backup process, it does have to delete the UnreadMail key.)
Any ideas?
Yep, same here.
I've confirmed this to be an issue on PCs where the UnreadMail key has somehow been deleted (according to a Microsoft doc I read at some point, it should be there by default). I'll adjust the next release to remove it even in this instance.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!