Thunderbird Won’t Open…
I use the Mozilla Thunderbird client to check our departmental e-mail account. This morning, it hung on me and I had to Force-Quit the application. Every time I tried to re-open the application after that, I kept getting the following message:
Close Thunderbird. A copy of Thunderbird is already open. Only one copy of Thunderbird can be open at a time.
Not wanting to restart my iMac – because of other tasks I had running and also because I was uncertain this would even help – I searched around and found this MozillaZine Knowledge Base Article. If you aren’t into all the technical stuff, here’s what it boiled down to for me…
My profile was locked and I had to unlock it. Depending on your OS, the lock may have the following file name:
- Windows – “parent.lock”
- Mac OS X – “.parentlock”
- Linux – “lock” and “.parentlock”
Once you know the file you are seeking, go to your Profile Folder and delete the lock file.
Please note that file names beginning with a “.” are considered hidden files and may not be viewable through a file/folder browser. On a Mac or Linux OS, the easiest way to remove the lock file is to use a Terminal application. Here’s how I did it:
rm /User/myusername/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/myprofilestring.default/.parentlock
Of course I’m using a Mac, but the command in Linux will be similar just with a different location for the file.
