If I start thunderbird and then go to Edit->Account Settings->Server 
Settings and select 'Use secure authentication' next time I try to 
retrieve my mail, thunderbird pops up the following message box:

"Could not initialize the browser's security component. The most likely 
cause is problems with files in your browser's profile directory. Please 
check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard 
disk is not full or close to full ..."

A few seconds later it crashes with segfault. Without any encryption 
options it works fine. I tried removing ~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird 
directories and recreating them again with thunderbird and doing 
recursive 'chmod -R +rwx' on all the files in those directories, but I 
keeps crashing.

Any ideas why it behaves in such a strange way? Thanks.