Netscape Mail not working after system shutdown

[Gian Antonio D'Addetta]

Hi,

maybe one has experienced similar problems: I had to shut down my HP-Unix 10.20 machine, after rebooting i get a malfuncttion of netscape 4.77, we are using as mail program. I'm using a pop3 server and can read incoming mails without any problems, but when pressing the button "New Message" within the composer netscape hangs and i have to kill the complete process, as nothing happens. By the way, it is no problem of the POP server. Two colleauges of mine using Movemail experienced the same problem when shutting down their systems earlier. Interestingly when logging onto another machine within our network it works, therefore i think it is a mchine dependend problem. I compared some boot log files, with that of other machines but could not find any severe difference. Even a copy of the complete .netscape and nsmail directory did not help, as i'm sure that it is a machine dependen problem.

I hope some of you has an answer. Thank you

Gian Antonio

[S.K. Chan]

Found this , it may help. From Technical Knowledge Base...

This is a known problem with Netscape Communicator which occurs when a user's home directory is NFS mounted. This symptom can occur when the Netscape executable or the Netscape directory in the user's home directory are located on NFS mounted volumes. This situation occurs because starting up the mail composer invokes a spell check process which is trying to lock a dictionary file (custom.dic) in the user's database under /home/user_name/.netscape.

With a user's directory NFS mounted, this process fails and causes the application to lock up.

The work-around for this problem is to disable the spell checker by renaming the directory /opt/ns-communicator/spell:

# cd /opt/ns-communicator
Note: Your netscape communicator executable may be in a different directory.

# mv spell spell.bak

Restart the Netscape Communicator.

[Gian Antonio D'Addetta]

Thanks al lot for the hint,

unfortunately we had to shutdown all our machines including that one, where netscape was installed, due to a power supply check. Afterwards everything was ok again, but i'm sure i can try the procedure described above later on, when the problem will again appear.

Gian Antonio