I've been using Mandrake 10.1 for a while now. The problem is some programs (i.e. Thunderbird) all of a sudden doesn't open at all, I can only see it being executed for a few seconds (the hourglass running) and then nothing, everything disappears. How do I fix that?

what exactly happened before this situation

Open the app from the command line and see what errors you get, is usually the first thing to do.

Hi, I've been having the same issue with SuSE 9.3. The problem was caused by the 'fam' (File Alteration Monitor) daemon.

I had a quick look on Mandrake/Mandriva's package list and it looks like Mandrake also uses fam.

Try opening 'ksysguard' or hit [Ctrl]+[Escape] when you next login, and when things start going slow have a look at fam's system resources. Mine was climbing all the time to 75-90% and was causing apps to not load or lock up.

Killing fam fixed the problem and I haven't noticed any loss of functionality yet when fam isn't running.
I was able to disable fam on bootup by opening up a root console and doing a 'chkconfig -s fam off'.

HTH

When I type thunderbird it says:
bash: thunderbird: command not found

The command is mozilla-thunderbird for most. Also try to use tab completion for commands.