try starting Thunderbird while holding the shift key (same as restart with add-ons disabled) when you start Thunderbird.

If it works like that download from getthunderbird.com and reinstall. Does that fix the issue?

Did a restore to 24 hrs ago and older version (38.5.1) works fine.

Oscar54B said

Did a restore to 24 hrs ago and older version (38.5.1) works fine.

And that proves what exactly? Going to be staying on your old version for ever? At some point you are going to have to upgrade. Deferring the problem will probably compound it.

My personal desire would be to remove the whole windows restore. It breaks as many Thunderbird installations as it fixes and results in fixes like this that fix nothing.

Matt said

try starting Thunderbird while holding the shift key (same as restart with add-ons disabled) when you start Thunderbird. If it works like that download from getthunderbird.com and reinstall. Does that fix the issue?

Matt said

Oscar54B said

Did a restore to 24 hrs ago and older version (38.5.1) works fine.

And that proves what exactly? Going to be staying on your old version for ever? At some point you are going to have to upgrade. Deferring the problem will probably compound it.

My personal desire would be to remove the whole windows restore. It breaks as many Thunderbird installations as it fixes and results in fixes like this that fix nothing.

Well your first reply was to disable an add-on. So that proves what exactly? That there is a problem with the update? Maybe I will just wait a while to see if this problem results in another update to fix the first update.

Add-ons can become problematic. Running Thunderbird in its Safe Mode, without any add-ons or other encumbrances helps us ascertain if vanilla Thunderbird is itself in trouble. Many of us are using TB38.6.0 without any trouble at all (I have it on Windows 10, 7 and Linux) so there's a fair amount of evidence that it does work. But a helper here can't know what else you have that might have broken it.

If safe mode sorts it, you can start testing your add-ons by adding them back one by one, then go harangue the author of the misbehaving add-on.

Yes there may well be a problem with the update, there have been issues for months with Lightning. They were supposed to be fixed before this update. I am beginning to suspect they have not. If the disable works there is a simple fix.

What I can assure you is waiting will fix nothing. All programs have an update cycle. V6 was a problem for you. You will keep getting offered V6 until you accept it because it is a prerequisite for V7 is the logic used by most up daters.

We (Thunderbird) are discussing exactly what to do with the folks still on V17, the suggestion is ignore them and turn the updater off for that version and before. So they will wait until the end of the world for their update that fixed whatever caused them to say no way back then. Or they will bite the bullet and actually install the latest version manually, and probably still have the issue from years ago that no one remember and have a bad time in support because their original issues will be made worse by other changes that have been made since.

I'm not sure what you are telling me. Are you saying to go ahead and update to the latest version and use it by disabling Lightning? Would I have to disable it every time I loaded Thunderbird?

As I understand it , Lightning is a Mozilla product, and part of Thunderbird, yet you are saying that there are problems with it. Are the same developers involved with both products? Why were the problems not fixed before releasing an update?

the issue is not with either Thunderbird or lightning, it is with the update of lightning.

If it works without lighting, simply reinstalling will fix the issue.