I didn’t need any recovery, but this process compresses the catalogue. I had initially been searching for something to fix a noticeable performance decrease after I had tagged several hundred of my 6,000 photos. This technique reduced the size of my catalog from 400MB to 20MB! The organizer now works smoothly again.

Now I’m investigating rsync and duplicity …

Thanks for your help!

Tracey - you can stop Thunderbird from automatically updating by (when you get it to start again using one of the ways detailed above)
Tools -> Options -> Advanced tab -> uncheck automatic check for updates [alternately, leave that checked, but select 'Ask me what to do' below - this will be more annoying, however]

I have none of the conflicting programs mentioned above (quickCam, spybot, etc), so there must be some other programs making troubles

I also had this problem of the endless loop of error and re-update trial and the only solution was normally to kill the process from the task manager (winXP)

Before starting Thunderbird, I installed UNLOCKER, which detects the bottlenecks apparently. The thing is this time I had no problem at all and the upgrading went smoothly.

hope it helps

M.