Thunderbird: Can't Help for Hurting

I've been an enthusiastic Thunderbird user for a fairly long time, and have only noticed odd quirks from time to time. One such quirk is the fact that occasionally a newsgroup article will show completely the wrong content: like the content of some other article altogether. This happened again today, and my first thought was to report the bug.

Now I've reported bugs in the past, and been told that they were duplicates of existing reports. So this time I decided I'd do the right thing and follow the reporting protocol. After all the guys who put Thunderbird together deserve some consideration, and I'm sure many users are cluelessly inconsiderate of the fact they are one amongst milliions and that they haven't paid a cent for some pretty high-quality software. I can't tell whether there is any description of such a bug in Bugzilla -- it might be bug 239665 or it might not.

It turns out that one if the things you are supposed to do is install the latest nightly download in a blank folder with a new profile and see if the same error occurs. This is not a prospect I relish as it will involve a certain amount of setup, but I do the download (nothing much else to do in my hotel room) and start the install. Unfortunately it turns out there's an error in the install, and I see a dialog box showing

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library error R6034: An application has made an attempt to load the C rutime library incorrectly. Please contact the application's support teamfor more information.

Lucky me: I thought I had one problem, but now I have two. I feel duty bound to report this new error under the "Installer" category. Fortunately the installer completes, and I can run the new Thunderbird to confirm the same error occurs (though I stupidlu omit to bring my RSS feeds forward into my new version). So now I can go ahead and add to the bug report for the original problem, since unfortunately it hasn't gone away. My motivation is severely diminished, however, so this may not actually happen. At least I reported the installer problem.

One step forward, at least only one step back.