and what gives if you disable ZA completely?
disable ZA… well, i admit I haven’t tried that ( damn! the idea didn’t even occurred to me) …
yes … worth a try … will try this late night today… (see I can’t reboot now… in middle of something )
btw in the meantime I checked few old logs of ZA, in one of them I find following entry regarding avast…
(although I’m pretty sure it has nothing do with the present problem… but still who knows ::))
ACCESS,2010/02/01,22:43:08 +5:30 GMT,avast! Service was blocked from accepting a connection from the Internet (<ISP here>:DNS).,N/A,N/A
that’s what you called nothing to do with ??? that shows clearly that avast has been denied access to internet traffic, at least once…
But that’s incoming(accept) connection blocked and also from ISP:DNS, in fact it seems pretty common with any internet facing app I use…
for example logs are full of following entries:
ACCESS,2010/02/01,17:42:30 +5:30 GMT,avast! antivirus Update was blocked from accepting a connection from the Internet (ISP:DNS).,N/A,N/A
ACCESS,2010/02/01,22:41:24 +5:30 GMT,Opera Internet Browser was blocked from accepting a connection from the Internet (ISP:DNS).,N/A,N/A
and those app’s runs perfectly…
Avast is not a browser…
Hello,
tried with ZA disabled, with only XP firewall on, same result.
oh no :
this was the very last thing I could think of…
very true Logos… seems like perfect mistry :
anyway by poking around service applet, it seems that the mail scanner depends on RPC and something called aswMon2, any idea where the hell I suppose to find aswMon2? ( I want to check it status, and it’s not listed in Non-Plug’n’Play drivers under device manager) 
Sorry for interrupt…
One of avast!5 user said he has no problem with Gmail and Thunderbird, and he said about this topic.
He said “Try to insert 995 into POP Port(s) in ‘Redirect settings’ and set Thunderbird’s SMTP port as 25.”
I hope this can help your problem.
Hello NON,
thank you…
sorry but your solution didn’t work for me …
Have you tried a reinstallation of Thunderbird? I just had to install 3.01 again because of some corruption in the update files somewhere along the way.
no but this(tb) is the fresh installation.
my older tb was v2.x, so I thought it would be better to install fresh rather upgrade.
Since you seem to have tried everthing else, maybe a separate download and over the top reinstall of 3.01 would help? Fixed some other TB problems for me.
hm…there is no harm in trying that I guess… so okay will try that too…
of-course will post the outcome here…
thank you guys…all of you…for trying to helping me out…
I’m beginning to think this has to do something with the openSSL package avast using…
anyway I give up
Thanks.
when you reinstalled Thunderbird, did you also delete your profile folder + other Thunderbird traces left behind in application data and program files? The problem is you’re in POP, and if you delete your profile without saving your mails, you lose them. The thing is that your profile could be corrupted and be behind that mess. If you set Gmail not to delete mails on the server when downloading them (done from the web interface in Gmail settings), you could mark them all as unread…and download them again once you’ve created a new profile in POP. Or may be switch to IMAP this time 
OK I don’t know, it’s not normal that you can’t get it to work with Avast…
Yep. cleared them all.
as for loosing mails…naaaa…I use “ImportExportTools” extension. 
would you mind uninstalling ZA completely and reboot?
OMG not again…
C’mon Logos, you sure knew, un-installing ZA is real PITA. :o
it’s up to you I would do that, but don’t hold me for responsible if that changes nothing… ;D