[Techtalk] debug info: Firefox and Thunderbird?

[Deborah Gronke Bennett]

I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 plus all the latest updates on my laptop. 
Recently, I've started to have random crashes from Firefox and 
Thunderbird. Before this the programs would stay up for many, many days 
(sometimes weeks) without problems. Now one or both of these programs 
are crashing almost every day. When they crash, the window just 
disappears, no error message appears on the screen. These crashes are 
frequent enough that I want to collect any debug info I can so I can 
google to see if I'm having a known problem or not.

I run a stock distribution (that is, I don't build debug versions of 
these programs). Are there any tricks for gathering debug information 
from them? I noticed that Thunderbird has an error console, but it's 
going to disappear when the program crashes. I'm looking for some way to 
dump debug info into a logfile somewhere. Any hints, suggestions, places 
to look for tips?

Thanks,
-deborah