This is all very strange. I have been trying to restore my thunderbird mail to the thunderbird mail of another machine. After deleting the contents of the thunderbird folder of destination machine and replacing it with the same contents of the source I notice wiered things...

BTW this excerercise does eventually restore my mail.

I notice that each time I restart, switch user, do "init 6"...basically anything to do with the getty program the system freezes. The symptoms are, my desktop icons become really big and my mouse freezes. Only options left open are to do a hard "power off". This happens in both user and root mode.

I get the same symptoms using Slackware and PCLinuxOS. Further pointing to KDE or the getty program.

Knowing my luck no-one has experienced this problem...!!!

I have switched to Debian 4.Or5 and everything seems to be fine so far but have not tried to restore my icedove mail yet.

Any insight would be appreciated. I would also be grateful to know how to give thanks to those who help.