Marco's note was the key for me. In my case some conflict between Compiz and Mate caused my desktop to go completely crazy. One of the effects was to make every application go full screen. After cleaning up the mess, all the apps went back to more-or-less normal but Thunderbird. I had already tried the localstore.rdf method without success. But Marco's note about using xulstore.json did the trick!
Until then, while I tried to get this working, the only way I could get to my Panel was by hitting F12, which brought up the miniterminal and coincidentally showed the Panel. But then I could only minimize Thunderbird. (And I ended up with a dozen or so miniterminal windows...) The right-click options on the Thunderbird button in the task list did not show Thunderbird as maximized. So the easiest thing was to just use File->exit in Thunderbird each time I tried things. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to thunderbird in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/196058 Title: Thunderbird starts in a full-screen mode and cannot be restored Status in Mozilla Thunderbird: New Status in thunderbird package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: WORKAROUND: 1. Edit ~/.thunderbird/*/xulstore.json 2. Search for: "sizemode":"fullscreen" 3. Change it to: "sizemode":"normal" OLD WORKAROUND: 1. Edit ~/.thunderbird/*/localstore.rdf 2. Search for: sizemode="fullscreen" 3. Change it to: sizemode="normal" ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION: Binary package hint: thunderbird I've tried clicking F11 in various of places and even all the rest of F-buttons, with Alt/Shift/Ctrl, and still no result. I've scrolled throughout the whole advanced configuration and there was nothing about full-screen mode. I don't have any extensions yet installed on my Thunderbird and I don't know what to do next. The problem has it basics because the profile that I've switched to, comes from previous Windows installation. I'm begging for Your help. It is stupid but really frustrating. ProblemType: Bug Architecture: i386 Date: Wed Feb 27 10:05:55 2008 Dependencies: DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04 Package: mozilla-thunderbird None [modified: /var/lib/dpkg/info/mozilla-thunderbird.list] PackageArchitecture: allSourcePackage: thunderbird Uname: Linux 2.6.24-10-generic i686 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/196058/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp