Greetings:

Thank you for the great and vital help you bring to the Mac community!

Because Cross-platform Thunderbird 1.5 2, Cross-platform Firefox 1.5 2 have no support forums, I'm hoping there might be some kindred assistance I can receive here.

I currently have on my 50/50 Mac/DOS partitioned 1gig flash drive: Cross-platform Thunderbird 1.5 2, Cross-platform Firefox 1.5 2, Portable AbiWord 2.4.4 r2.9, and AbiWord Portable 2.6.2, all in the DOS partition, leaving my Mac partition available for main files locked inside a sparse image. On Macs other than mine I run the cross platform apps and portable AbiWord 2.4.4 via aliases in the Mac partition. When I'm at a location with only DOS machines I run the cross platform apps nicely to get mail and do the web and can collect and store local docs and files in a sparse disk in the DOS partition for later access on my Mac and visa versa. This config all works very cleanly and well (a poor Man's "mini-Newton") and except for having duplicate AbiWord so (because 2.4.4 doesn't run in DOS), saves space.

My problem (more annoyance so far) is that when I happen to run Cross-platform Thunderbird 1.5 2 and Cross-platform Firefox 1.5 2 on my Mac (I don't normally do this since I got my main arsenal on my HD of course), after they finish running, they leave behind localstore.rdf, extensions.rdf, downloads.rdf, and mimeTypes.rdf files in the top window of my HD. Don't know if the same occurs on DOS machines. I don't know whether this is a fault of the programs or some installation flaw of mine, though the same thing occurs if I boot a virgin dmg of those programs and run them for the first time too. Outside of littering other folks machines, I'd like to know whether this is a security or performance hazard.

My second question is securing Thunderbird in my DOS partition. Though I have all of TB's password and security features on, I assume that won't protect the files themselves if I lose my flash drive. I was thinking of packing TB into a coded sparse drive in my DOS partition to open up and run in there when needed, but can this work and is it safe?

My third question is can I replace the (old) core executable cross-platform TB/FF files inside their folders with the latest non-cross-plat Mac versions and would they run?

Thanks for any assistance!

James Greenidge

I can answer at your third question; yes, you can replace old TB or FF MAc applications with new ones and also perform automathic update.

(Anyway make a BackUp copy of your data and do a test before)