The awesome folks over at Mozilla have released an update to Thunderbird (2.0.0.18 as of this writing,) and my copy detected and offered to install it as Mozilla software typically will.  But the update failed, and I wound up in a nasty do-over loop as it tried repeatedly to install.

Long story short, it was the Logitech Webcam built into my laptop that was blocking the problem.

The Logitech Webcam has a helper application that loads at startup.  If you're having a similar failure, you may wish to disable the webcam temporarily with whatever startup program manager you prefer (contact me if you need help in that regard,) reboot, then try the Thunderbird install again.  Don't forget to re-enable your webcam startup program and reboot after the Thunderbird install works successfully.

My approach was a little more brute-force, since I was clueless as to what was failing the install.  So for the curious in the crowd, here's the short story made long...

I went in search of where Thunderbird was downloading the update.  I looked in my AppData folder and found a Thunderbird\Update folder.  In it was an update log file.  Scanning through it, I found the point of failure immediately after a line that indicated it was trying to replace mozMAPI.dll.  But since Thunderbird was not running, what in the world could have that file open and locked out?

Using Process Explorer,I searched for "mozMAPI" which revealed that the Logitech software was using the dll.  It also told me the Process ID of the Logitech software which I used to locate the process in the main list of all running processes.  A right-click and "kill process" took the webcam out of play.  Installing Thunderbird's update went error free thereafter.

Hope this gets you  out of the loop.

There may be many reasons for Windows Vista to down-shift its Video Mode from Aero to Basic.  In all instances, something is going wrong with the way an application is accessing the display functions within Windows.  But what?  That can be the really daunting question.

For me, the problem surfaced when I was replacing my laptop's hard drive with a bigger one.  In addition to the "opportunity" to reload Vista along with everything else, a benefit is that things come out much cleaner in the end.  It's an exercise I expect to have to grind through at least once every couple of years.

And having gone through it enough on a personal level, I'm sympathetic to what my clients have to go through during the process also.  But for as annoying as it can be, it's definitely worth it in terms of regaining performance and streamlining everything.

But as luck would have it, Paint Shop Pro Photo XI - my trusted graphics editor - wasn't as impressed with all my labor as it could have been.  It kicked the video mode back from Aero to "Basic" whenever it ran.  As loathe as I am to throw money at a problem, I did see this as an opportunity to upgrade to Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate for about $60, and I hoped that installing it might just purge my little video Gremlin.

No such luck.  X2 dropped the video mode back to Basic, too.  Drat.

One of the "extras" that comes with X2 is a couple of sets of video tutorials that seemed might ease the familiarization curve with the new product.  So, by chance in the middle of troubleshooting stuff, I fired up one of the videos.  Vista dropped out of Aero and into Basic again.  But the videos didn't rely on the Paint Shop Pro product itself at all.  In fact, they are apparently MOV videos that launched in Quicktime player.

Ah ha!  I had installed a German language instructional program, the Berlitz Learning System, which I remembered was the first source of Quicktime that my Laptop had seen since the new drive was installed.  So I checked the version of the player that launched with the Paint Shop Pro videos, and compared that to the current version on the Apple website.

Installed: 7.0.4.  Current: 7.5.5.  I hadn't yet installed iTunes and there is a download for Quicktime + iTunes, so I snagged it and installed - being careful not to just blindly accept the installation defaults.

On the other side, everything's coming up Aero around here!