Please check your addons as well as your thread options.

That response is of absolutely NO HELP WHATSOEVER.

Did you even read the post you replied to? Did you even check your own copy of TBird?

If I'm POSTING this message then OBVIOUSLY I've ALREADY checked the f*^&\$ settings. And no, I didn't go loading it down with addons. And I certinly didn't come here for non-answers that serve no function other than a veiled attempt at telling the user to solve their own problems and artificially reduce the number of *technically* unanswered questions.

I'll repeat:

In threaded view, thunderbird is only letting expand/collapse the top-level message (ie expand/collapse *all* messages in a thread), and is missing the expand/collapse buttons for all other messages. This is a problem for navigating large threads. How do I get those back?

Is there no twisty next to a thread that will expand the thread?

Only on the top-most "root" message in each thread. Not on any of the child messages (obviously the leaf nodes shouldn't have it, but even child messages that *do* have children still don't have that expand/collapse button - only the root message in each thread).

I think guigs2 was asking if you had checked to see if any addons/extensions were causing a conflict.

You would ned to start in Thunderbird Safe mode. Help > Restart with addons disabled.

If all works ok in Thunderbird Safe mode, then one of your addons is causing a conflict, so you would need to gradually enable one at a time to see which one is causing the problem.

Please test this and report back.

Also confirm you have 'View' > 'threads' > 'all' seclected.

It's not related to addons or the "view -> threads" setting. The problem still exists in thunderbird safe mode, and yes "threads -> all" is selected.

This occurs on two completely different systems: Debian Icedove 31.0 and on Win7 Thunderbird 24.0.1. It also occurs in both email panels and newsgroup panels.

What happens when you select: View > Threads > Expand all threads

And what happens when you type "*" (same thing as expand all threads)?

"What happens when you select: View > Threads > Expand all threads" "And what happens when you type "*" (same thing as expand all threads)?"

In both cases, all the threads expand. Similarly, "Collapse all" and "\" both collapse all threads.

I'm not sure I see how this establishes anything about why it's not letting me collapse sub-threads and only letting me collapse the entire thread...?