Thunderbird follies

So I installed Backport's Thunderbird .deb (the Mozilla folk's mail client) on one of my work machines (I run testing, mostly, and Thunderbird isn't in there). I hadda replace Opera's M2, which, though otherwise wonderful, doesn't have (annoyingly) a 'Forward as attachment' function, which is something I need for reporting spam to SpamCop, so I thought I'd give the new kid on the block a chance.

As seems usual for Mozilla backports stuff, the default theme was wonky, causing nasty crashes in which the error 'BadPixMap' figured prominently. And unlike the Firefox setup, the Thunderbird one wouldn't even start, since, apparently, the offending icon appears by default (the Firefox one only went down if you clicked on certain menus, since the bad icons only got drawn when you did this).

The fix was easy enough. Debian folk, take note, as I can't seem to find this issue documented anywhere:

1. Get a new theme from the themes page, save it to home.
2. Become root.
3. Rename /usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/chrome/classic.jar to classic.jar.old or somesuch.
4. Copy (yes, copy, not rename--you'll need it again) the new theme .jar you saved in home into /usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/chrome/classic.jar (you're just covering the .jar with the bad pixmaps with another).
5. Start Thunderbird. Note that you probably won't get a lot of icons, and it will probably look terrible and be a nuisance to use, since the new theme .jar you just dumped in over classic probably won't map properly to what the system's expecting. You don't care; the object is just to get the damn thing running so you can use the program's built-in theme smarts to replace the bad one properly.
6. Click cancel when it prompts you to set up an account--this is not something you want to try to work through while you've got no icons.
7. Select Tools>Options (you will probably need to use Alt-O to get to Options once the Tool menu's down, since you probably can't see the damn menu with the icons broken).
8. Click themes.
9. Click 'install new theme', and select the new theme .jar you saved to home.
10. The name of the new theme should appear in the pane, but you can't click it yet (probably another bug). Just close the Themes window
11. Select Select Tools>Options again, and select themes.
12. Select the new theme, and then click OK.
13. Thunderbird should now tell you you'll see your new theme when you restart. Click ok, and close Thunderbird.

That's it. When you restart Thunderbird, it should look much prettier, and you can set up accounts, do whatever you need to do much less painfully.

A word of caution--there are other themes with issues similar to those Classic presents; I went with RAF's Modern for Thunderbird; it seems to be complete. I've also yet to determine howinhell to get rid of the wonky classic theme, which is probably gonna cause trouble for anyone setting up for multiuser machines; anyone else setting up a new Thunderbird account on such machines is gonna have to go through installing and picking the new theme too. Bit of a pain. But such is life with Backports. The good news: 'Forward as attachment' is present and seems to do what I need it to do.