What is your question?

Permit me to repeat the question with my definition of "complete uninstall" appended as it was in my original post, plus an addendum:

QUESTION: How do you perform a complete uninstall of Thunderbird in Windows XP?

DEFINITION: A complete uninstall means, as a minimum:

1) Thunderbird does not show up in Add/Remove Programs, 2) There are NO folders or files anywhere on the computer named Thunderbird or created by Thunderbird when it was installed (this includes TEMP folders/subfolders, 3) There are NO keys in the Registry that have Thunderbird in their name or value.

In other words, the computer is left completely naive about Thunderbird.

Following a reboot, it should then be possible to re-install Thunderbird with only default settings, which can then be changed by importing profiles, messages, etc.

ADDENDUM: Obviously, a trip to the Control Panel will take care of #1. Secondly, a search for Thunderbird using Windows's own search or any good file/folder search tool will take care of #2 if every hit is deleted. Regedit will also obviously take care of #3. This is a typical brute force approach. All provided there are no files/folders/registry keys/DLLs etc. that were placed in the computer by the previous installation and that are not named Thunderbird.

The value of a complete uninstall should be obvious: It permits a clean re-install after a re-boot, hopefully without the problems that necessitated the uninstall.

look I am not sure ahat your trying to do. but to remove the profile folder type $appdata% as the start button run box and press enter. Delete the folder named Thunderbird.

However that is a total last resort. People are trained by Microsoft to uninstall and reinstall because they write their programs to almost exclusively use the registry. It is the same registry that makes their software run slower and slower over time, requiring the regular re installs... In the case of Thunderbird it rarely does anything. Other that lost stored mail that is no longer on the mail server.

So perhaps you could offer what is the problem your trying to fix with an 8lb hammer and a large wedge.

@Matt

What you really told me is that Thunderbird does not have a procedure/script/etc. which does a clean un-install. My sequence of three steps is as near as one can get to such a procedure. Among one of the things I tried several iterations back was to go to Docs&Setting/UserName/Applications/ (N.B. the command is %appdata% not $appdata%, by the way) to delete the Thunderbird directory. It did not clean out the registry (of course) so the problems re-appeared.

Even though Thunderbird does not use the registry as a sandbox to play in, as some ill-behaved programs do, my guess is that TBird uses the registry to get file location data on start-up as many well-behaved programs do. At least some subset of the problems I've seen point fairly clearly to this proper use of the registry as a portion of the underlying issue -- a bad installation. I think I can recognize a bad installation when I see it; I was using computers before Bill Gates was born.

A standard Control Panel "remove program" can clean up the registry to permit a re-install to see the host computer as naive, but only if the Uninstall script includes this capability. In another of my iterations in trying to get a good installation following a somewhat clean un-install, I tried the Control Panel approach and found registry keys remaining all over with the proud name of Thunderbird as part of the key name. I kept banging on F3 until I got more than a dozen hits and then gave up.

I could of course take the approach of trying to fix one problem at a time until the only problems that remain are small enough to ignore or are apparently bugs in TBird. Personally, I consider that approach to be sloppy although I've known many programmers who use it. My assumption is that the programmer(s) who wrote the program did fairly exhaustive testing before they released it. If that assumption is correct, doing an install after a complete un-install should work.

The host computer is clearly not the problem since I have TBird working under a Win7 install on the same machine. All my computers except a 386 laptop are dual-boot, mostly Win7/WinXP, with a few also including a virtual PC. I could of course just continue to use the Win7 installation, but I try to minimize that drive's access to the internet. I would like to get back to getting mail via WinXP's TBird not Win7's.

To answer your question, the problem I'm trying to fix is an obviously bad installation which manifests in many symptoms. I don't blame Mozilla for the bad installation. After my version of Eudora could no longer keep up with the latest and greatest change in SSL Certificate semaphoring used by my email server, I tried to migrate from it to TBird, but had to take a detour through Outlook and Outlook Express to preserve my old mail files.

TBird is a good program which shows many of its roots in Eudora -- like mail files in ASCII, which admit of a great way to quarantine a suspicious email and examine the mail file in a low-IQ ASCII reader like Notepad. If I had a file location problem in Eudora, it could be fixed in a heartbeat since it uses an INI file instead of registry keys for file locations.

The 8 lb. hammer and wedge approach (once used by Microsoft to un-install a version of Office (2003? maybe)) which it looks like I'll use, beats the old nuclear option which still works although its name is a little obsolete. Back in the day, we called it the "Format C: /s" solution. The nuclear option is probably the only solution for some really nasty malware. But I digress. Thanks for your help. I couldn't agree more with your comments about Microsoft's training us.

<tl;dr>

Just remove the profile for a clean start. You are over-thinking it. The only references to Thunderbird in Windows' registry will be to set it as the default email client, or to set file associations so the OS knows what to use to open an eml file. You're obsessing about things that aren't there or don't matter.

Bear in mind that Thunderbird also runs on OSX and Linux and therefore cannot rely on Windows Registry for its own settings. All of its own settings are stored in its profile, which you have been advised to delete. And it's hard coded to look for its startup file (profiles.ini) in one precise location.

I would still like to know how the bad installation manifests itself. You say you have decades of experience identifying a bad install. I have probably not as many. But I have been using this Microsoft pig for more that 25 years and I do know what loadihigh means. Just as I know win.ini and system.in are still loaded before the registry, even though they were deprecated in 16bit windows.

I think your obsessing about things that are not an issue with the registry and clean install. The installer updates relevant integration registry settings. SO I really do not see a point in even looking there.

You mentioned file locations. Thunderbird gets it's base path information from the %appdata% environment variable. Well it uses a C++ Windows API, but the net result is the same. There are others for program files, and temp. Then there is the profiles.ini file in the Appdata\roaming\Thunderbird folder. This tells the location of the profile and if it is relative or absolute. It is also home to the known profiles you can choose from the profile manager. Final location paths for mail accounts are stored in the prefs.js file along with all the rest of Thunderbird settings. "Next is that Thunderbird does not store default settings. So if a preference is at it's default value, it simple does not appear in the file.. note editing the prefs.js is done with the config editor. Very bad things can come from very small typos in a text editor.

Changing the location path for an account is simple, but not encouraged, as moving a profiles is easily done. Moving a hard coded files structure based on absolute paths is very difficult, as the tree must be replicated exactly to the thing to work. In Windows parlance even the drive letters must match. a true PITA in the making.

BTW Like Eudora, Thunderbird for XP is on it's last legs. The next may well be the last release for the platform, unless a separate XP installer is included for future versions. XP only knows SHA1 and the Thunderbird installer is moving away from that now basically broken standard.

No final decisions have yet been made, as there is still almost 12 month to make that decision.

Finally I am amused by your desire to connect XP to the internet and limit the access of Windows 7. I would have through about the only folk that used XP on the internet were a few brave souls doing malware research.

@Matt & Zenos

Can't work on the TBird problem for about 24 hours, but I found a problem in the prefs.js file which is guaranteed to cause problems (No, I didn't try to edit it). There are references in it to the F drive which is the Win XP boot drive as WinXP sees its drives. This is good. There are also references to a C drive. This is not good. As Win XP sees its drives, there are only drives lettered D through F and I plus the optical drive at R. Drive C is used by WinXP as a removable medium (e.g. USB stick or the SD card in my phone). Win7 sees its drives differently (as usual) so it sees a C drive as its boot drive.

The bad drive reference would cause at least one of the problem manifestations: Inability to send the text of a message after it's composed.

Thanks to you both for the INI and JS info in particular.

@Matt only:

I think you misunderstood my remark about bad installs in Windows. My memory tells me that Windows 3 was the OS when I first ran into a bad install on a Microsoft-based computer. I don't remember the first version of DOS I used but it was well before DOS 6.X. One of the reasons why I still use XP in an Internet environment is my generous use of Restore Points, full-system backups, Virtual PCs, clean-room type practices, and a good set of XP fix-it tools. I haven't seen a good Win7 toolset. The other techniques apply to Win7 although I haven't tried to run a Virtual Win7 within Win7.

Tell me more of this inability to send text? What exactly is the error.

Note here that an email exists in memory until is the written briefly as NSmail.HTML in the temp folder. Something really brought to notice with this latest avast release See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Antivirus_Related_Performance_Issues#AVAST

Those folk can not send mail either.