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Home > 98lite Professional > Issues with Apps (9x)

Mozilla, Thunderbird and Firefox lose their settings if the user swaps the active 98lite shell type between the Win98 and Win95 shells (e.g. Sleek to Chubby).

by LitePC

Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Firefox store user profile data in different locations depending on the version of Explorer.exe.

If Mozilla, Thunderbird, or Firefox is started under the Sleek desktop all existing profile & account information is missing when you shellswap to Chubby. The program apparently cant see the old profile folder so it runs the account setup wizard. The same happens when using shellswap to change from Chubby to Sleek.

After returning to the previous desktop configuration and all accounts & profiles return.

This is a result of a poor design decision by the Mozilla team that presumably was made to adopt the Microsoft strategy of storing application data in the "c:\windows\application data" folder tree on later versions of MS operating systems.

With the Win95 Sleek or Micro install Mozilla applications (including Thunderbird and Firefox) store user profile information under:

Mozilla: C:\Windows\Mozilla

Firefox: C:\Windows\Mozilla\Firefox

Thunderbird: C:\Windows\Thundirbird

With the Win98/Me Explorer in the 98lite Chubby or Overweight configuration the Mozilla applications (including Thunderbird and Firefox) store user profile information under:

Mozilla: C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla

Firefox: C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox

Thunderbird: C:\Windows\Application Data\Thundirbird

We have submitted various reports to Mozilla on this issue. Note the inconsistency between Firefox and Thunderbirds behaviour with Firefox in the Mozilla folder but Thunderbird on its own.

You can copy the relevant folders one location to the next to recover all the settings if you swap shell configurations using 98lite after installing and using Mozilla, Thunderbird, or Firefox.

e.g. if you use Mozilla or Firefox and swap from Chubby to Sleek you would copy c:\windows\Application Data\mozilla to c:\windows\mozilla

e.g. if you use Thunderbird and swap from Chubby to Sleek you would copy c:\windows\Application Data\thunderbird to c:\windows\thunderbird

Of interest - there is a also a Mozilla bug that people may come across where Bookmarks file is not read/saved when the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Favorites does not exist. This has beed submitted to Mozilla as bug id 227471.



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