Comment 40 for bug 711314

I am new to Bugzilla so please pardon any gaffes I make.

I'm having this problem with Mozilla 1.21 which I've been using pretty much ever
since it came out on a variety of machines mostly with Win98. At different times
I've had problems with the address book drag and drop, and other times I've had
problems with Mozilla locking up, or refusing to load at all, or refusing to
start mail or the AB after the browser is running. I've come to the conclusion
that this is no coincidence, that the AB problems are at the root of all of
this. Every time I run into the problem it seems to get more severe.

I recently uninstalled Mozilla, deleted old profiles (saving the data), and made
a clean install. I didn't import the old AB for a while to make sure everything
was stable; I just added names to the clean AB as needed. After a few weeks of
stable operation I imported the AB with lists and everything was fine; I even
sent out a message to various lists. Then tonight I tried to drag/drop a new
name into a mailing list. After a few attempts Mozilla locked up, and though I
can start up the browser I can't start up Mail from the Start menu, a shortcut
on the desktop, or the button on the bottom of the browser window. Ditto with
the AB button. So I guess I will try a clean reinstall again. This is a Win98
box, the one where my lists are the largest and the most dynamic and the one
with the most problems.

I was hoping that moving up to 1.4 or 1.5b or Thunderbird would fix things, but
judging from the many, many bug reports I've seen about D&D in the AB, this
problem has been around for a long time on all platforms and there has been no
progress fixing it. Most of the bugs get reported as duplicates and most of the
others get closed with the "works for me" treatment.

Obviously this is a subtle and/or intermittent bug and I'm frustrated enough
that I'm ready to do some methodical debugging, but I'm not sure how to proceed.
If anyone can give me some suggestions, I'd appreciate it.