Thunderbird and Firefox 2.0 Display Glitches (And Workarounds)

(Updated below: clarification)

(Updated 2 below: another possible workaround)

I upgraded to version 2.0.0.6 of Thunderbird this morning. The installation seemed to run successfully, and everything seemed to work when I restarted the program. However, I noticed a problem with the display in the main window: the text in the message pane was garbled. It looked like the text had been overwritten. Also, moving around in the message pane using the up and down arrow keys caused weird highlighting, as though every other message had been selected.

It turns out that the problem almost certainly stems from my particular setup: Windows 2000 SP4, running on an old Dell Precision 330, featuring an ancient graphics card, an NVIDIA RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro. This is a known issue, and you can read all about it in Mozilla's bug database.

There are at least a couple of known workarounds. First, I first tried Dao Gottwald's add-on for Thunderbird, "Hot Fix for 'garbage in folder contents pane' bug 1.0." This solved the glitches, but it also had the effect of removing the "zebra striping." Zebra striping means that the lines of text in the message pane are displayed with alternating background colors, which makes it a lot easier to look at a list of messages. I didn't want to do without this feature.

The next thing I tried was turning down the hardware acceleration for my graphics card, from its default setting of "full" to one step below that. (How? See "Update" below.) This did the job, and better than the hotfix -- the glitches were gone, and the zebra striping was retained.

As a happy side effect, this workaround also seems to have fixed a minor display glitch in Firefox 2.0, something called "tab ghosting." If I had multiple tabs open in my browser, switched focus away to another app, and then returned to Firefox, I would see garbled tabs, partially overwritten with icons from the toolbar. (The overwriting would clear itself when I clicked on the tabs.) This problem has also been noted, and again, for a very small set of graphics cards.

If you want more details, I've posted them on the Thunderbird and Firefox support forums.

Finally, note that you probably have to be logged in as Administrator to change the acceleration settings.

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Keywords for Googling fellow sufferers: Thunderbird 2.0 text garbled, Thunderbird 2.0 text overwritten, Thunderbird 2.0 message pane garbled, Thunderbird 2.0 display problems, Firefox 2.0 tab ghosting, Firefox 2.0 tab display problems.

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Update

2007-10-04 00:06

In the comments for this post, Tim gave the succinct description for changing hardware acceleration:

Start/Control Panel/Display/Settings/Advanced/Troubleshoot/

I did describe this in the posts I put up on the Mozilla forums, thinking the full technical details belonged there, and not here. But Tim's one-liner deserves front-page mention, to save you having to click a link.

Thanks, Tim.

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Update 2

2008-07-30 10:30

From the comments, here's another possibility: If you'd rather not mess with your display settings, try installing a "theme." I have not tried this myself, but Blog said it worked for him or her.