Thunderbird already running even after restart

Hi Rob, does it's icon show in the Dock? If so, click on it & see if Open at login is checked.

Check System Preferences>Accounts>Login Items window to see if it is listed there, if so, highlight it & click the little minus icon below.

When you click on it in the Dock, does it say Thunderbird up in the Menubar, with options to open windows?

Open Activity Monitor & Show All Processes, is TBird there & can you force quit it?

OK, glad you got tbird working anyway... sure is a bit strange though.

Rob,

The last message from BDAqua says "OK, glad you got tbird working anyway..."

I'm having the same problem! I've deleted the Thunderbird application, empties the trash, restarted the computer, and reinstalled Thunderbird. Then when I try to start Thurderbird, I get the same message you reported, "A copy of Thunderbird is already open. Only one copy of Thunderbird can be open at a time." I go to "Force Quit, and there is nothing there to quit, at least no Thunderbird.

How did you solve this perplexing problem?

Thanks.

Toby

Same problem as Toby on MacbookPro running 10.6.5

I've been through the support sites, some people found a solution by deleting a hidden file (BE VERY CAREFUL!) called .parentlock in /applications/thunderbird folder. No such luck for me.

It seems to me that the problem arose with a migration to the new notebook. There's some tagged file that either came over or did not come over.

I have the relevant folder with the profile that I need. I've tried reinstalling TB and then editing the profile.ini file to point to my proper TB profile. No luck. Help please?

Hi Everyone, and a warm welcome to the forums! 🙂

Open Console in Utilities, look at the system log from the last startup on, any mention of Thunderbird or some http:// launching?

Is TBird set as the default browser?

Same problem.

I solved it by checking the profiles.ini file (open with text editor). In the file, I noticed the profiles inner default folder name was named incorrectly (I had been messing around with trying to copy my stuff over from a PC).

I changed the file name shown inside profiles.ini to be the correct ovc4e35hu.default (I just made that name up; your file name will be different). To find the correct name for your file, go into your profiles folder and you'll find a folder named blahblah.default (it will be some random numbers and letters, not blahblah).

Hi zambu, and a warm welcome to the forums! 🙂

Thanks for the post, seems like fantastic info, especially for a 1st post, hope to see more of you! 🙂

By the way, I should mention that the error message "Thunderbird is already running" is wrong or misleading at best. In my case, it was not running, but I still got this message. I'm sure there is some logical reason why this message makes sense from a programming point of view, but from a "simple user" point of view, it's confusing.

Indeed, but if you got it to stop that message... great discovery 🙂

Look inside of the Library/Thunderbird/ directory for the "Profiles" directory. That's the directory that keeps all of the information about how you have Thunderbird set up it also has your mail in it and extensions. Make sure that this directory did not disappear. I would suggest backing a working version of it up to a server or backup drive before you have this problem.

As another poster suggested, I would also agree to open your Profiles.ini file in TextEdit and look at the path that the .ini folder is reading from. There should be some weird-named directory listed similar (but not necessarily) "zybe45.default". It's in that folder where your "stuff" is. Make sure that the name of the folder on your hard drive AND the typed path name inside of the "profile.ini" file are the same. This will bring Thunderbird back up. I hope that this helps.