profiles in Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird

[Pybe]

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 17:31:45 -0500, Matt Morgan <minxmertzmomo at gmail.com> wrote:
> First, let me confess that I know this is not a Fedora problem, but I
> think it's of interest to this list.
> 
> We have a problem with some terminal workstations we're running. They
> boot Fedora (or Debian, some of them), and go straight into an
> rdesktop connection to a Windows Terminal Server.  On the terminal
> server, we have a custom (but freely available*) kiosk version of
> Mozilla for the browser, and Thunderbird as a mail client.

What do you do to get it to boot straight to rdesktop, this is
something I was thinking about trying the other day.

> 
> Something about Thunderbird is fairly funky with the Terminal Server.
> Thunderbird often does not terminate correctly, so people often get
> that message you get about choosing a new profile when they
> double-click to start TBird. It's confusing for them, and irritating
> for us.

When does this occur? When logging off disconnecting or closeing
reopening tbird?

> 
> I know that this happens because of the presence of a lock file in the
> TBird profile folder. If we delete the lock file, then Tbird will
> begin to start normally. One potential solution is to write a new
> shortcut that
> 
> 1) finds the lock file and deletes it first, then
> 2) starts Thunderbird.
> 
> But this seems unclean. People might click it when Thunderbird is
> already actually running, and I don't know what that might do.
> 
> We have no use for Thunderbird profiles, either in Linux or Windows.
> Everyone's already running within a unique user profile, and the
> Thunderbird profile only causes trouble.
> 
> Is there any way to tell Thunderbird, Mozilla, and/or Firefox to just
> quit offering new profiles to each user? Or does anyone have any other
> suggestions for how to deal with this issue?