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Thanks for all the input. Clint, I actually used the option you suggest. All this does is allow or disallow Windows to go online to check Windows Update for a driver. It does not prevent Windows from trying to load a driver it already has locally. Also, if Windows cannot find a driver locally, it aborts the driver load. It does not allow you to specify a driver. Ted, you are exactly right. I have worked hard to make sure I find 64 bit drivers. For Ted and Joe, this may be partly a problem of the hardware vendors. For my HP4100 printer, for example, HP no longer supports it. So there is no Windows 7 driver. (I did not try any Vista drivers.) HP does provide a universal driver that is supposed to work. However, when I downloaded and installed that driver, it did not ask me to plug in the printer as part of the process. When I plugged in the printer right after, Windows ignored the driver I had just installed and installed a new one it selected. So Windows did not recognize there was already a driver loaded for the device. Windows seems to only be able to link a USB device with a driver when the driver is loaded the first time Windows discovers the new USB device, and that is when Windows takes control.

I actually ended up purchasing a new Lexmark E460dn printer to partly get around the lack of HP support. Lexmark supplies a specific Windows 7 x64 driver, which I checked before purchasing it. However, when you load this driver and then plug in the printer, Windows ignores that driver and installs its own. Lexmark support showed me a way to get around this when the printer is network attached. You cannot use the Windows command to install a network printer and let Windows find the printer, or Windows again puts its own drivers without giving you any choice. However, if you tell Windows you are installing a local printer, then specify a new TCP/IP port for the printer using the specific IP address, then Windows lets you select to not automatically search for a driver and instead point to your disk (or file) for the driver. This is how I successfully installed the Lexmark printer.

I guess some hardware vendors know how to specially code their drivers to first install their driver and then have you plug in the device so their install software can link the USB port with the just installed driver, as Joe suggested. That is how I installed my Canon inkjet printer. Similarly, for my Logitech mouse Logitech has a Setpoint program that I installed before connecting the mouse. In this case, however, Windows seemed to install some kind of driver, so there may be a low level Windows driver that links with the Logitech installed software. However, other vendors provide drivers but not ones that take over the process in this manner. I just think it should not be this difficult.

Thanks again for all the advice.

I have used Acronis from True Image Home 11 on Windows XP through True Image Home 2010 on Windows 7 x64. I have never had any problems. I do not use the one click backup or the hidden partition backup. I find it very simple to use the wizard to backup my entire disk (system and all files). Basically, just choose a location, select incremental or full backup, and go. Using defaults for all other options works fine. I like the fact that one can do an incremental backup of the full disk, which allows more frequent full disk backups but using less space on the backup drive. I also like that you can access an individual file or files from the full disk backups. When doing a full restore, I always use the recovery disk, which is what my latest manual suggests. This has saved me several times when I had a difficult to diagnose problem like a blue screen on a driver problem. The only problem I ever had was when I had a blank password on the network disk I used for backup. The Acronis recovery disk software would not process the authentication properly for some reason. (It worked fine when run within Windows.) However, by creating a non-blank password the recovery disk worked fine.

Having said that, there are a few things that are not ideal. Acronis can be used to backup just user files, also, for example, My Documents directory. However, it is not as versatile as some other backup programs in the way one sets up what directories to backup. In particular, other programs such as Retrospect permit macros that can easily be customized to backup only certain directories at any time. Also, the many options with Acronis do raise questions from time to time. For example, I discovered that the Windows 7 x64 on my new laptop apparently creates a separate partition on the system disk for protected operating system files. When I select full disk backup with Acronis, the software shows me the two partitions and asks me what to backup. However, it is easy to just select the whole disk. Some other disk imaging programs don’t allow separate partitions to be manipulated, so this never comes up. Acronis is more versatile in being able to restore to a different size of disk and even rework partitions, for example,when the system disk is upgraded. But that is not something I have ever needed. All in all, I recommend Acronis especially for full disk backup applications. At least it has worked for me.

I cannot say if I can solve your problems because I have no insider knowledge of Thunderbird. However, here are a few suggestions.

I just moved from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3 mainly because Mozilla is no longer supporting Thunderbird 2. On the account setup issue, I missed it the first time, but on my screen I have an Edit button. If you let TB do its thing, it seems to always pick an IMAP setup, but I use POP3 for all my accounts. However, after it stopped, I clicked on Edit, selected POP instead, and let it run again. Sometimes this gave me the right settings and sometimes not. However, if not, I just clicked on Manual and made whatever changes are necessary on the Account Setup page. If you do not have a Manual button, you can let TB setup the account and then go to the setup page from Tools>Account Settings. There are differences in the way security is handled from the same page in TB2 (secure authentication, STARTTLS vs. TLS, etc. are different). I had to experiment a bit with these settings to get my accounts to work. However, I have set up four accounts (Google, Network Solutions, Site Ground, and a local ISP) and they are all working fine. My main reason for delaying is that I use Cloudmark Desktop as a spam filter, and it does not support TB3. However, Cloudmark now has a beta program that does support TB3 and, if you get all the settings right (32 vs 64 bit), seems to work fine.

On your other strange errors, I had similar problems a while ago with TB2. I found out that just uninstalling and reinstalling the program does not help. This usually indicates that the profile files themselves have become corrupted. This is very frustrating. If you have very large email folders like I had at the time, it can be even more frustrating. I started archiving using MailStore Home (free) so that my TB email folders are kept pretty manageable. Anyway, the only way to fix those profile corruptions is to rebuild a good profile carrying over the bare minimum of files. Here is what I did. I copied my profile to a temporary location, and then deleted the one at the original location. I reinstalled TB and had it create a clean profile. This requires you to re-enter all your email accounts. Then I moved only the critical information from the old profile to the new. You can copy the address book abook.mab (regular AB) and history.mab (collected addresses) into the main profile folder and just replace the new ones there. To be extra safe, what I did was let TB create new, empty email folders for every one I had in the old profile. Then I went to the old (moved) profile. One at a time, I located my email folders in the profile under “Mail” then the subfolder with the account name (server name, usually) and transferred the old emails into the new profile. For example, for Inbox on my Google account, I found the file Inbox (not .msf) in the old (saved) profile under “Mail” and subfolder “pop.google.com”. I renamed it Inboxtemp, and I copied it into the same folder in the new profile. I left Inbox.msf alone. When I restarted TB, I had both the newly created Inbox and now one called Inboxtemp that contained my old emails. I copied all the emails from Inboxtemp to Inbox, and I deleted Inboxtemp. I did this for every email folder. One other thing. Sometimes when TB recognized the Inboxtemp file it assigned a tag of important to all the emails that was not there before. (This appears to happen when it builds the .msf file.) I had to select them all and remove the tags from the menu. This is all a bit tedious, but it leaves you with a completely fresh profile. Once I did that, I had no further problems. You should be able to do this just for the email folders that are causing problems, but I did all my folders and accounts to make sure there was no corruption left over. I know; it should not be designed so that corrupted email or other profile folders cause these kinds of issues, but it apparently does happen.

I hope this helps. TB3 seems to be stable for me now. One thing is to try to keep your email folders to a reasonable size. Also, under Settings, find the one for global indexing and uncheck it. It can cause slowdowns especially when you have big email folders.