Taking things one at a time...

> 1) "Lists" no longer work. Have to select each person's email individually rather than just the wanted "list".

In compose, putting a list name in the address line, what do you see?

> 2) Program keeps locking up completely causing me to have to "kill" the computer manually to get out of it.

What happens if you do the following - as a test only - Start *Windows'* safe mode with networking enabled - win8 http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/windows-startup-settings-including-safe-mode - win7 http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Start-your-computer-in-safe-mode Still In Windows safe mode, start thunderbird in safe mode - http://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/safe-mode

Does problem go away?

> 3) Address book list now comes up at "All Address Book" rather than in my chosen default address book.

True, it does come up in All Address books by default - to facilitate searching - rather than the "first" address book. Is that a long term problem?

Also "locks" my computer up every time it "receives" email. And I mean, locks it so I have to "kill" manually, no control-alt-del to get to task manager and force program shut down, but hold the button in and "kill" the whole computer, which is NOT good for the computer! I tried the things you suggested above, made no difference. Also, the "lists" function, which no longer works, basically amounts to when I select a "list" name for an email, it puts the list name in the "to" box like usual, but when I hit "send" it tells me the address is invalid and that I have to fix before I can send. The only "fix" is to manually select each email address I need to send the email to rather than the "list" (and since the only purpose to using "list" is to eliminate the need to add individually but insert them in one fell swoop, this seems to rather defeat the whole purpose of "list"). Also there does not appear to be a way to "undo" the "upgrade/update" so we are just stuck with an unusable email program. So unless a "fix" is issued to fix the myriad problems, we can't use Thunderbird.

1) smacks of address book corruption 2) Try Tools|Options|Advanced|General and disable hardware acceleration 3) This appears to be a deliberate design change. Has it ever "remembered" the user's preferred address book? If not, this simply changes the start point but doesn't change the need to select the wanted address book (unless the default PAB was your choice anyway.)

Whilst it would help everyone more to work through the issues, you could go to:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/

to find an older version to get you back into business.

Found a fix for the main problem - that of Thunderbird locking the whole computer up when receiving messages (so that have to manually "kill" the computer) - in options, just removed the "alerts" when new messages are received. Yay. However, the issue of the address book all combined into one huge default book is still there, as is the failure of the address "lists" function - have tried creating "new" lists but same problems - program is no longer recognizing the lists so it considers it an invalid address. So these 2 things are still out there needing resolution. I did download Thunderbird again and let it reinstall over itself but that didn't do any good at all. I see from one of the answer posts that downloading a previous version might work but unfortunately, when I go to that link, it just lists a zillion files for each "release" and nothing stands out as being the "one" that would reinstall the previous version. So help on that would be best as it would eliminate the other issues since they didn't exist until this latest "update" from Thunderbird (38.05). Thanks to all who have made suggestions to fix.

Pick your version. 31.7.0/ was the most recent previous version.

Pick your platform: win32/ for windows, mac/ for mac, etc.

Pick your language. I use en-GB/ since I'm in the UK.

Next is your installer. Download it. (right-click, save as...)

Find it in your Downloads folder (or wherever you download to), double-click it or whatever your platform does to launch things.

I think you'll find your address book Mailing List issue will persist; I think that's a corrupt address book data file.

You will get back the usual choice of address books, meaning the minor annoyance of the "all address books" option will vanish.

But I don't get any of the failures you report, so it's hard to agree that TB38.0.1 is actually broken.

What happened in safe mode? Did it still lock?

Still locked. I did experiment Friday and found that if I unchecked the notifications box in settings that the locking up stopped. (after about 10 more lock-ups while I played around trying various things in settings) The thing with the address book is still an issue (i.e. it comes up in "all" rather than specific and lists do not work at all) and since the lists function is something that is I use all the time, I am now going to just reinstall my original version of T'bird and just never allow it to "update" again.

Today, I just reinstalled an old version completely - and THIS seems to have fixed the issue with the address books, etc., lists are now working again, and I will just never let it "update" T-bird again. Thanks to all for suggestions and help.

I wish you would have told us what platform you are on - windows, Mac, linux

And whether disabling notifications also disabled sounds on notification. (or perhaps you did not have sound enabled)

Sorry - I thought I did originally but I use windows 7 pro (64 bit).