Thunderbird 9.0.1 does not launch

[francis picabia <fpicabia@gmail.com>]

I normally have no problem with this.  I install thunderbird
update when prompted by the app and it is normally
able to update itself.  Today it seemed to update, but
then nothing came back up.  Manually launching it
failed to do anything - no error.

I downloaded a fresh bzipped tar and installed it
in a new directory.  Running thunderbird from there
on the command line also does nothing.  I can run
with -h and it shows help, or -v and it shows
the version is 9.0.1. OK.

I am running the file thunderbird as I have always done.

Has anyone else run into problems and found a solution?

The last 3.1 icedove from mozilla.debian.net works OK, but it
doesn't see the most recent thunderbird 8 configuration of
accounts, etc.

I found moz_libdir in the thunderbird script was pointing to
a non-existant directory, but even pointing this at itself
did not help.