Hello!
I have the same issue here with Debian testing (amd64) and Thunderbird.
It happened afew days ago, like 4 or 5or so, after upgrading (apt update
; apt upgrade).
The current version of thunderbird on my system is 1:52.4.0-1.
I also have the packages icedove and [thunderbird|icedove]-l10n-de
installed.
The error message is *always* "Thunderbird is already running, but is
not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing
Thunderbird process, or restart your system."
I first thought that it might be a broken profile. So I deleted the
.parentlock according to
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_in_use#Remove_the_profile_lock_file
which gets recreated everytime I start Thunderbird and get the same
error message.
Since my profile folder has some symlinked directories outside of
$HOME/.thunderbird, but inside $HOME, I also created a new profile for
testing. After starting with "thunderbird --ProfileManager" and creating
the new profile I found it shows the exact same behaviour, every time I
try to start the fresh profile as well as the main profile. I deleted
the newly created profile again.
I also noticed that when running /usr/bin/thunderbird I had two new
processed pop up, with the later having a by 2 higher PID than the
first. Additionally the second (i.e. by 2 higher) PID process would be
maked as <defunct> in the listing of "ps -A | grep thunderbird".
The work-around which worked for me was to bypass the wrapper script
/usr/bin/thunderbird as well as /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird and
instead start /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin directly.
For convenience I copied /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop to
$HOME/.local/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop and did some
editing, so that it has a different name for distinction in the start menu:
-- snip --
Comment=Thunderbird (direct, without wrapper script)
GenericName=Mail Client (direct)
Exec=/usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin %u
-- snip --
Works now for me.
The question remains as to what causes this behaviour, since it
obviously does work /somehow/ when running thunderbird-bin, not
thunderbird. But why is that?
