I’ve just done something to my computer, and I don’t know what. More importantly, I don’t know how to fix it. I had my browser (Mozilla 5.0) open, and a Mozilla e-mail window on top of it. I accidentally clicked on something in the upper-left corner (in the vicinity of the red, yellow, and green buttons), and my e-mail window apparently vanished. On further investigation, it turns out that the window is still there, just shrunk to a tiny sliver a single pixel wide, and perhaps 20 pixels tall. If I can manage to double-click on that shiver, it minimizes (the minimized icon version of the window is actually larger than the full thing), and I can grab the window and drag it around, but I can’t do anything else with it. If I exit Mozilla and re-start, then the new mail window I open is still slivered, and rebooting the computer didn’t help, either.
Of course, I can’t live without e-mail, so can anybody please tell me how to fix this?
In the Mozilla folder, click through your Profile folder (named either “default” or a Profile name you entered). The full path will look something like this:
Inside the folder with the really weird name (it will be different from what I listed above) look for a file named “localstore.rdf”. Delete this file. Don’t worry - Mozilla will regenerate it. Now launch Mozilla. Your windows should be back to normal.
Wow, thanks, that worked. It also deleted everything from my URL pull-down menu, but that’ll recover. Incidentally, do you have any idea what I did in the first place to cause this?
No idea. I’ve seen almost the same thing happen with Mozilla/Netscape several times, although in those cases the “sliver window” seemed to be the result of a Web site attempting to deliver some sort of popup window. It pops up, but way too small. And if I didn’t notice the little window, it would end up being the last window open when I quit Mozilla… and then the next time I launched Mozilla, that little sliver would be my default window size.
I tried manually resizing a couple windows (by dragging the lower right-hand corner) to see how small I could get them. The browser window wouldn’t get any smaller than about 1.5-inches high by 2.5 inches wide; the “compose mail” window got no smaller than 1.5" x 1.5". So when the “sliver window” happened to me, there must have been some code in the page specifying a window size smaller than what should have been possible. I suspect skullduggery - some advertiser was probably trying to create a “hidden” window sized 1-pixel by 1-pixel that nobody would notice, and the tiny page probably had code to track viewing habits. Of course, it was probably aimed at Windows users running Internet Explorer - it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that MSIE was capable of creating a 1x1 window. It obviously didn’t work with Mozilla, creating a window that was 1-5 pixels wide, but as tall as the title bar would normally be.
I have no idea what you could have done yourself to cause this to happen in a mail window, though.
Sorry about that - I didn’t realize that was in that file too. Are you talking about the “autocomplete history” thing in the URL bar, where when you start typing a URL a menu drops down listing previously visited URLs?