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Accepted
Tommy Pollák
Asked: 2020-10-29 08:39:29 +0800 CST

After upgrade to 20.10 Thunderbird stops with parsing error

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When starting Thunderbird in Ubuntu 20.10 an error message is displayed

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xhtml
Line Number 905, Column 3:
  <key id="openLightningKey"
--^

and nothing more happens. However Thunderbird can be started in "safe mode" with the command line command

thunderbird -safe-mode

I have a number of language packs installed, German, English (CA), English (GB), French and Swedish.

How can I make Thunderbird start OK from the apllications menu?

thunderbird 20.10

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I was experiencing the same problem just earlier after installing an official language pack by Mozilla. After closing and restarting Thunderbird, I was shown a popup with the exact same message you posted, and couldn't get Thunderbird running again.

    Based on messages in this (German language) forum thread: https://www.thunderbird-mail.de/forum/thread/85658-thunderbird-startet-nicht-bzw-gibt-fehlermeldung-nur-im-safemode-m%C3%B6glich/?postID=468615, others are having the same problem, also after having recently installed or updated language packs.

    I managed to solve the problem on my end by moving the offending file ([email protected], in my case) out of Thunderbird's extensions directory. On my system, all my Thunderbird settings, including the exensions directory, reside at /home/MYUSER/.thunderbird/RANDOMSTRING.default.

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  2. The accepted answer did not helped me but this did:

    1. start thunderbird in the command line/shell/terminal with thunderbird --safe-mode
    2. choose "disable all add-ons" and
    3. click the button "Make changes and restart". Then it can be started as usual like using the the normal thunderbird start icons or thunderbird in the command line/shell/terminal.

    Maybe this is a more elegant solution for users that do not want or can move files in the configuration directories.

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  3. I managed to work around this issue on Ubuntu 20.10 by starting with thunderbird --safe-mode and removing all language packs (menu "Add-ons" -> "Languages"). Note that on my system I wasn't able to remove all of them since some of them were installed from Debian packages. Turns out the latter weren't causing any problems, though, and I was able to start Thunderbird without safe-mode.

    In case you want to remove the language packs installed from Debian packages as well you can do so by running (adjust according to the languages installed on your machine):

    $ apt purge thunderbird-locale-de thunderbird-locale-en

    After doing so the list of language packs should be empty and you should be able to start Thunderbird normally.

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  4. In particular in fedora 31 with TB 78.3.1 (64-bit), I went to /home/MYUSER/.thunderbird/RANDOMSTRING.default/extensions and did following (which eliminated the problem).

    % mkdir suspect
% mv langpack-en* suspect
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