Opera’s Mail Client Problems

November 02, 2003

The Opera web browser is excellent in many ways, but some sites will just plain crash it (Microsoft used to write their websites to exploit such flaws, I seem to recall).

It seems that sometimes when this happens the ‘interesting’* mail client built into Opera called M2, won’t start when you reload Opera. It will pop up a small window telling you that “Store Init failed” and “Engine Init() failed”.

This seems to be because there is some Opera process/thread still running, and it has first dibs on certain Opera files. So, when you reload Opera, the second instance can‘t get access to the files it needs. The fix seems to be to delete the autosave.win file in your profile and then restart Windows (that old trick). When the machine comes up again, the ’hidden’ Opera process/thread will not be running and Opera will be able to start M2 without any problems.

At least you don’t have to reinstall Windows while reciting ancient and forgotten incantations in plain view of a blood moon.

* Interesting (adj): innovative, incomplete.