What is "greyed out" my menu bar on windows 7 is pale blue with black text. If that is what your talking about, it is the new colour scheme.

salrose said

The menu bar is ticked (selected) but is greyed out. This only happened on booting up today. The drop down menu items are still there and the items work. I have tried re booting the PC

Sorry I wasn't clear. The text is white on pale blue. If I hover over a menu item the drop down menu items are black

Sally

The fact that it responds to your hovering suggests it isn't actually disabled.

You could try some alternative themes ("skins") to check up on Matt's suggestion that it's a new colour scheme to blame.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/themes/

I'm afraid I don't know anything about themes. I just use TB as it is installed. Would I lose any of my mail if I uninstalled Thunderbird and reinstalled it ?

Regards

Sally

What do you hope to achieve?

A normal uninstallation of Thunderbird removes only the program and leaves all of your data untouched, ready to be used again when you re-install Thunderbird.

Re-installing is most unlikely to make any change to the colours.

The themes are for Firefox, aren't they ? It is my Thunderbird that suddenly put white text in the File menu.

Happy Christmas

Sally

Firefox and Thunderbird both have themes. It is annoying that the mozilla add-ons website doesn't always respect your search terms and often offers Firefox material when you seek Thunderbird

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/complete-themes/

Probably better to go via Tools/Add-ons/Appearance to select, download and install a theme.

Apparently the default theme is by Arvid Axelsson and it doesn't give any details. It was updated on 21 Dec 2014. What next ? Any way of asking him how to put it right ?

Sally

If "right" simply means a difference of opinion about what looks good, then your obvious choice is to try some themes until you find one that makes sense to you. You haven't yet said anything that suggests to me that it's technically broken. ;-)

Merry Christmas!

Being just a user I wasn't suggesting it was broken, only that I can't now see the File menu line. I just want it to look like it did before the 21st.

FIne cold day here in London !

Sally

I don't know what to suggest. Your previous description told us it's there but the wrong colour. Now it sounds like you can't see it. The cure for an invisible Menu is to enable it, but you told us the relevant checkboxes were already ticked.

Do try to post a screenshot for us.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-create-screenshot-my-problem

Here is a screenshot.

Sally

I'd definitely try some other themes.

Thunderbird picks up some of its colours from the desktop's colour scheme. If you have somewhere else set to have pale letters on a dark background, Thunderbird may have borrowed the letter colour but used its own background colour. A theme may provide a happier combination.

Personally I dislike the current vogue for translucent borders; it looks cluttered and indistinct to me, and I use a theme that gives it an XP look and feel.

No. I do not have pale letters on a dark background anywhere. I don't change that sort of thing. I do regard this as a Mozilla problem. I changed nothing and Mozilla has changed Thunderbird. Where can we go from here ?

Sally

What theme do you use in Windows? (Open Wordpad in Windows, is the menu bar the same as Thunderbird? For that matter what version of Windows? Home basic starter etc.While there were themes changes in December, none I can find affect the menu bar.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=11774371&resolution=---&chfieldto=Now&query_format=advanced&chfieldfrom=2014-12-01&chfieldvalue=revolved&component=Theme&product=Thunderbird

I am using WIndows 7 Home Premium 2009 with SP1.

I friend has suggested the following:

"All you need to do is to install the disable compatibility check add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunde ... ty/?src=ss, ignore the warning, and enable the theme. It works for me when I tried it with TB 31.0. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Common_miscon ... hunderbird (needs some minor updating, but still useful). As an aside, TB 31.0 seems to break all of the personas I have. I get a solid color instead of the pattern that I'm supposed to see. Unless 31.0 fixes some bug that is important to you I'd recommend falling back to 24.7.0 and give them a couple of point releases to fix some bugs. "

Is the first para what is required ?

Sally

Um, enable which theme? The comment appears to be aimed at someone wanting to use a supposedly incompatible theme or add-on, but so far you haven't given any sign of being willing to try other themes.

I don't use the default theme; I think it looks ugly and broken.

Even my email reply screen is weird. No options for font changes or bold, etc. (png attached)

Though I am an experienced PC user I have never bothered to acquaint myself with themes - mea culpa.

Which version is the most stable and how can I find it on the Mozilla website- I will go back to that to end these problems.

Sally

Your Compose window has opened in plain text mode. Nothing wrong with it, from a purely pragmatic point of view. It's working as it's designed to do.

In principle, Thunderbird opens reply messages in a like-for-like way; if there is nothing in the incoming message that requires or needs formatting, it offers the corresponding plain text editing mode.

There are add-ons that allow you to reply always using HTML, regardless of the formatting of the incoming message, or if you hold down the shift key whilst clicking reply it will open in the alternative mode.

Thank you about the html mode - but it never did this before this TB version from anyone - and now I have to press shift to reply as I would like. How do I set it permanently to reply in html mode. My email View/ Message body as is set to original html.