Don't know if I'm even in the right place, but, I just did the Avast update (I'm assuming it's
, and Thunderbird tells me "Could not initialize the application's security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application's profile directory." NONE of my email accounts load -- hotmail, gmail, other pop -- I have switched them all to SSL and eliminated the Mail Settings for those email acccounts in Avast's mail shield, obviously to no avail. What next?
RESOLUTION - as it turns out, the update probably just triggered something, and I found a fix - under the user appdata, find Roaming, then Thunderbird, then the Profiles folder, open Profiles click on the random letters and delete the file "cert8" it will rebuild when you reopen Thunderbird and it worked for me.