From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5+) Gecko/20011108 BuildID: 2001110821 First time I did a kill on the process while starting up (the process was not misbehaving per se but I was in a hurry to do something else). On subsequent starts I had no mail account and so on. I could not find a way to recreate the localstore.rdf file. Second time, I may have missed to close a window - not sure though - when doing a shutdown -h now. Again, all account info was inaccessible and I could see no other way out than to copy Mail and recreate the profile. I have now twice had to recreate my profile and reenter all accounts and passwords and other preferences. Fortunately I was able to salvage the actual mail. Note 1: The first crash occured with the release 0.9.5 build (which I no longer have) Note 2: this is critical due to the dataloss, not really because it's such an enormous bug. Reproducible: Didn't try Expected Results: First of all there is no excuse for corrupting the file on *start-up*. Mozilla has no business writing to it on start-up. If there seems to be such a need, then split the file. Secondly, why not use an intermediate file and interchange the files when the modified one has been verified to be correct. Thirdly, I would prefer if there was a way to "legally" import mail from an old *Mozilla* account and not just other mail programs. It would provide a clean and simple way to merge old mail with new.

As far a back end preferences goes, I imagine your bug would be a dupe of either bug 94010 or bug 98476. As the reporter is specifically complaining about localstore.rdf... ->waterson

Well.. I have upwards of 3GB of free space. This morning when coming to work I was once again greeted by a corrupt localstore.rdf. It seemed to be missing the start of the file, since it started with a > and removing this made the parser complain about there being junk after the end of the document element. I only lost a few mails this time, none of them really important.

It's the 4th time now that a corrupted localstore.rdf results in a location window that pops up at a wrong position.

Forgot to add that there were no crashes, always enough disk space left and memory free.

Johan: can you reproduce this bug with 1.0RC1? If not, set the bug to "worksforme"

It just happened to me. After that (don't know how this happened), mozilla tried to open a gigantic window on startup and crashed with: Gdk-ERROR **: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation) serial 1076 error_code 11 request_code 53 minor_code 0 Attached is the buggy localstore file.

Confirming bug.

tever is not RDF QA anymore

->prefs backend.

I've got a patch attached to bug 359472 that should fix this. I've been waiting for a review for three months. Is there a good way to speed this up? The patch is basically trivial, copying the technique that's used by the bookmarks service into the RDF serialization code.

(Filter "spam" on 'prefs-nobody-20080612'.)