After upgrading Thunderbird portable on my USB stick the local settings in the registry of my vista notebook referring to Thunderbird are changed. They all point to the USB drive which is not there most of the time. This is rather strange because PortableApps should not change my local registry at all in my opinion!
How can I remove all these changes in the registry because sometimes it is resulting in error messages. E.g. while clicking on a email link in Excel. Is it ok to do an local install of Thunderbird over the local existing Thunderbird install on my notebook (I don'want to loose my emails !!!) And would this fix the issue ?
Reinstalling should fix the issue and I don't think it would delete your mail.
cowsay Moo
cowthink 'Dude, why are you staring at me.'
It's a bug in Mozilla's updater. You can't let any Mozilla portable apps auto-update. That's one of the reasons it only notifies you but doesn't update it.
To fix the issue, if you have Thunderbird locally, you can reinstall it over the current copy. If you don't, just load your email client of choice and tell it to become the default.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
OK Thanks for your tips! I made a backup of my emails with Mozbackup (freeware) and reinstalled Thunderbird. All my emails are still there. Looking at my registry showed me that all references to Thunderbird no longer point to the USB stick. They now point to the Thunderbird install directory on the C drive as they should.
Anyway, while upgrading I think Thunderbird should show a warning on your screen that installing an upgrade over the portable version of Thunderbird while your default email client on the PC is Thunderbird changes the Thunderbird registry settings. At least as long as the bug is not fixed.
Okay, that run-on sentence was really confusing, but I finally understand it after reading over it five times...
That would require modifying Thunderbird itself, which we're not allowed to do due to the licensing agreement with Mozilla that lets PortableApps.com repackage the apps in portable form.
"that run-on sentence"
... english is not my native language ....