Mozilla Sunbird startup problems

[AnotherDesigner]

Heya, I'm hoping someone has the answer to this, even though it's a relatively new piece of software.

I've just downloaded and installed the calendar (edit) program Sunbird from Mozilla, but whenever I try to run the program, I just get the "sunbird.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." Windows XP error message.

I'm finding it highly annoying, and can't find anything about the startup problem I'm having on the Bugzilla site... So does anyone here have any suggestions/come across this problem with Sunbird?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, before I go completely bald with frustration :D

Muchos gracias amigos :)

[MstrBob]

Eh, Sunbird is a calendar program. Though if I remember right, it might be related to a calendar extension for Thunderbird. Or does it integrate with Thunderbird? Honestly, I haven't tried it.

But have you tried a good old reinstall? Uninstall Sunbird, delete your profile folder, and then fresh install. Worth a shot, at least.

[AnotherDesigner]

Hey, yea you're right it's a calendar program. It was just me typing quickly and thinking of 5000 other things at the same time.

*note to self - proof read before posting*

Right, yea I've tried uninstalling and re-installing. Deleting profile folder and fresh install - I can't even get the program to start first time, so I don't think I have a profile folder? I can't see one anyway.

The fact I can't get the program to run at all - for the first time - is the problem I'm having.

It doesn't integrate with Thunderbird, but there's some calendar extension for Thunderbird called Lightning I believe, Sunbird is a standalone though as far as I'm aware.

[MstrBob]

Ah yes, that's right. I think Sunbird and Lightning share a similar codebase (from the now defunct Mozilla Calendar extension if I remember correctly). Anywho...

Well, it is at version 0.3, so I guess stability is arbitrary. Honestly, since Windows isn't providing any debug help, there's not much to investigate. Unfortunately they don't supply a hash, so you can't check to see if your download is corrupted (though you can try downloading again if you want).

Your best bet is probably to post a bug in bugzilla (though I don't know how helpful it would be) and/or ask for help in the Thunderbird/Lightning Newsgroup (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/faq.html#sunbird_news). At any rate, it sounds like a problem the developers will want to know about.

[AnotherDesigner]

MstrBob you obviously understand more about the coding than I could ever dream of ;-)

Any ideas if there's a calendar program out there that is better than Outlook, but which would be export compatible with Sunbird? (Sunbird uses iCal I believe?)

Oh, and which is preferably free? LOL
Alternatively, I'm going to try downloading it (again) just to check, although there were no messages of corruption etc. *sigh* I'll go give it another shot :)

[MstrBob]

Honestly, iCal and Outlook are really the most complete calendar solutions out there. When it comes to Calendars, the choices are quite pathetic (which is why I hope Lightning/Sunbird shapes up well).

Myself, I still use paper calendars ( :o heh) so I don't know much about the options. I'm sure if you searched Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net) you could find a bunch of open-source ones, though how feature complete any would be is questionable. The only other calendar software I know of off hand would be Google Calendar (http://calendar.google.com). That however is a web app, which could be a good or bad thing depending on what you want.

Though I'm sure somebody could jump into this thread and yell at me for not knowing about such-and-such solution, heh.

[AnotherDesigner]

To be honest, I've only scratched the surface of Google Calendar when it was very first released in Beta mode, I've not tried it since.
Maybe I should give that a try.

I was hoping to find one that I could use whilst offline, but maybe Google will be the answer...

Anyways, happy new year, and thanks for the help :)