31.03 Broken
Right - typing this in for the second time, so a bit more pissed off now.
The latest 31.03 version of Thunderbird (which auto-updated) seems to be annoying broken in at least 3 ways for me on Win 7 64 bit. It now starts up on the 'Home' screen rather than my 'Inbox', which it has always done in the past. It always turns on the Message Pane each time is starts up, so I have to turn it off again. And it doesn't start downloading my latest email at startup - which it always used to.
I don't know what's happened with this build, and I've been a long time happy user of Thunderbird. But the combination of these 3 issues has very quickly become annoying.
Regards.
Krejt Përgjigjet (4)
And none of those particular issues have happened on any of my installations of Thunderbird on three different computers, so I don't think it's anything inherent to Thunderbird 31.3.0.
There are some rather more serious issues around the address book…
Out of interest, why do you disable the Message Pane? The usual paranoia about evil content?
Is it correctly set to collect email on start-up? Is it set not to show the Message Pane? (no, sorry, you answered that one.) Is it set to show the welcome page?
In my experience, such settings can become set or unset on updating. And tools such as CCleaner can erase files that store some settings.
Ndryshuar nga Zenos
For the past 'x' years, Thunderbird has worked well, and remembered all my settings when upgrading. For some reason this upgrade seems to have screwed up. Even though I changed all the relevant settings (un-setting and then re-setting) to my preferences (as inidicated above) it seems to ignore them on startup. I could deal - just about ;-) - with the upgrade reseting those things once, but it appears to be actively ignoring them.
Message Pane - I guess my preference for not having it set is grown out of paranoia about evil content. Over the years I've just got used to viewing messages in their own tabs - some of which I've leave open from session to session. I also like the 'full page' of the list of emails. Maybe I'm wierd - sometimes I like to visually scan down my most recent emails - I think I'm pattern searching out of curiosity - to see if there's anything unusual .. or something.
There are a few files in particular that store layout/configuration stuff. If you're prepared for the mild pain of doing some more (re-)setting up, deleting these from your profile may help (but no promises!):
panacea.dat localstore.rdf session.json
Safer, of course to hide, move or rename them, in case there's no improvement and you don't like the side effects.
Ndryshuar nga Zenos
I've just tried deleting all those 3 files individually and then restarting Thunderbird - none of them removed seemed to make any difference to my problems.