If thunderbird was your default mail client and you have turned off the dialog to ask on startup about being the default... You then go through IE / Tools / Options / Programs and change to an old mail client like Netscape 4.x and make if the default. The next time you launch thunderbird we *should* detect that we were the default but no longer are so we should show the dialog once. However old clients like netscape 4.x don't change HKEYCU\Software\Clients\Mail to point to Netscape. We check that registry key first and falsely deduce that we are still the default mail client. So we don't bring up the dialog.

fixed on the aviary branch, this patch and several more need eventual migration to the trunk.

This is not working on today's (9/3/04) "Aviary" branch build.

trix, can you check this out? we think it might be fixed in branch builds.

I believe this is working correctly on the branch. Still needs to land on the trunk.

*** Bug 238567 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

See also: bug 254262, comment 3 bug 254262, comment 4 and bug 254262, comment 5 These comments are about, seemingly, Thunderbird backing up the registry settings when it sets itself to default, but it was already default, so when you unset it, it still remains default. It should not do anything if it's already set to default.

this has been fixed on the trunk

> this has been fixed on the trunk Presumably due to the patch at bug 277833.