It is probably a good time to update to a more recent version of ubuntu since 9.10 will no longer receive support after April 2011. If you don't want to do upgrades so often, try using the LTS version of ubuntu. The most recent one is 10.04 LTS which is supported until 2013 for desktop or 2015 for server.

It is possible that your xorg.conf file is still referring to the fglrx driver. Try reconfiguring the xorg to use a different driver. Vesa should work in most cases.

What did you update before this problem occurred? Was it the kernel? Is it possible that you don't have the ATI drivers installed for the new kernel? Did you use Envy before that?

Like I've said before, it is probably a good time to upgrade the ubuntu that you are using to a more recent version. Hopefully the upgrade will fix the problem that you are having. Do a backup before hand.

This should give you some idea on how to backup thunderbird.

This post has been edited by Eventless: Mar 3 2011, 02:31 PM

Just try to upgrade your ubuntu and see whether that fixes your problem or not. With any luck, your problem will be solved and all your data would still be. Just make a backup of your home directory before doing the upgrade just to be sure. Reinstall if that doesn't work.

If your home folder is on a different partition, don't format it. Reuse it. Either create a user with the same username or different one. If you create a different one, copy all the files from the previous user into the new user's home folder. You may need to be root to do this. Set the user and group ownership of all the files and directory in the home directory to that of the current user. Even if you recreate a user with the same name, the uid and guid maybe different so you still need to reset the user and group ownership of the files and directories in the user's home folder.

Not too sure about other distros so can't help there.