verbw001, most people here (including myself) dedicating their time to help others and answering questions are volunteers and users like you. As said before, this forum is the official Thunderbird Support venue.

Based on the information provided so far the hangs disappear when Thunderbird is started in safe mode.

You can try to disable all extensions and then enable one at a time and see if the hangs return.

Among other things, Troubleshooting Information provides a list of installed extensions, which may give a hint which one is causing the problem. It is of course entirely up to you to decide to post your Troubleshooting Information here. If you choose not to, then I think I'm done here. Good luck.

StanleyKPatz, First of all you're hijacking someone else' thread.

Your problem may be similar to the one of the OP, but since you haven't provided any details, that's purely based on your speculation.

Furthermore, it doesn't make things easier to deal with multiple people and issues in one thread.

If you meant that I should start another thread soliciting suggestions for an alternative email client, I will consider that.

That's entirely up to you, but being sarcastic won't help you at all to resolve your problem.

If you're looking for help, please start your own thread.

Run without add-ons

To Martbd,

I wish it were that easy. I run TB in safe mode without add-ons and it still faints with regularity.

I think my hanging problem may be related to the spam filtering system. Now that I am thinking about it, I am disabling the junk filter to see if that helps.

To Martbd and all,

Well, that was a short, unsuccessful experiment. I disabled all junk filtering and was running TB in safe mode with no add-ons. TB fainted 4 or 5 times while I did various things like change an address, read or write email.

I don't know what else to do. I loved TB on my old WinXP computer but it is all trouble on my new Win8 machine. I have run out of patience with this balky program.

To verbw001 and christ1,

My apologies if I have broken some netiquette rule and hijacked verbw001's thread. But we may be working on the same problem and my starting another inquiry may never lead to a collective solution.

For me, TB faints all the time, regardless of what function I am performing, even when in safe mode. I performed another experiment: I composed an email in one window while watching my Inbox in another window. Sure enough, when TB identified an incoming message as spam, the program froze until the offensive junk was cleared away.

Even though I have unchecked junk filtering through Tools/Options/Security/Junk, TB has already "learned" many addresses and automatically moves these messages to Junk. The problem seems to be that TB takes way too long thinking about removing these messages.

I am working on a new Win8.1 machine with an AMD Elite A8-6500 3.5GHz processor, so the hardware is not the problem. It looks like I have to disable this automated spam removal system, one of TB's best features, suffer with the hangs or find another program.

Does anybody have an idea of how to speed up this process?

Thunderbird was basically useless for me, and I was going to download a new mail program. I just upgraded to Windows 8.1. and everything is working like a charm.

I disabled all the add-ons and everything. Nothing helped.

Try it if you can. But it took me about 3 hours after downloading 8.1. to reinstall, so have a backup plan in the meantime. Good luck.

I'm seeing the same thing. The hangs are getting so frequent that TBird is almost unusable. Which is really too bad, because I would much prefer to keep using this email client. (I am on W7-64 by the way.)

  I haven't tried turning off extensions.  I'll do that next.  I do have Lightening, as well as a few others.  I think someone else mentioned Lightening too, so I'm curious if it might be the culprit.

   Another possibility:  A few months ago, I tried using Tresorit.  It's a Dropbox-like program for cloud backup/syncing.  It seemed to cause hangs all over the OS, so I got rid of it.  I am now using SpiderOak.  I wonder if there could be conflicts when SpiderOak is scanning files to see what needs to be backed up, and then TBird tries to use those same files.  Is anyone else with these problems using SpiderOak or any other backup/sync program?

Thanks,

   DaveT