I took Dave's advice from a separate thread into consideration (well, decided to finally do the install of Thunderbird and see how I can configure and use it to access my Gmail as opposed to the browser based approach).
All in all, given the suggestions listed in this thread I was able to get this up and running. Pretty smooth so far, no complaints, but it's only been a couple of hours so far...LOL!
However, I have a question on strategy you guys are using to balance the system use (memory really) between Thunderbird and Firefox.
Specifically, I have the FFTurboLoad deployed, which works well for FF. I see that Thunderbird uses very similar, sometimes the same DLLs (name wise), so it would make sense to maximize that use.
I took a quick snapshot of the runtime loaded DLLs for both (PSTAT):
1) FF
G:\USR\LIB\LIBC066.DLL
G:\USR\LIB\NSPR4.DLL
G:\USR\LIB\LIBC066.DLL
G:\USR\LIB\LIBCX0.DLL
G:\OS2\DLL\SESMGR.DLL
2) THUNDERBIRD
G:\USR\LIB\GCC1.DLL
G:\OS2\DLL\SESMGR.DLL
G:\USR\LIB\STDCPP6.DLL
3) COMMON TO BOTH
G:\USR\LIB\LIBCN0.DLL
G:\USR\LIB\LIBCX0.DLL
G:\USR\LIB\GCC1.DLL
G:\OS2\DLL\DOSCALL1.DLL
G:\OS2\DLL\PMWIN.DLL
G:\MPTN\DLL\TCPIP32.DLL
Further on, I see that Thunderbird directory has several DLLs showing, which I'm going to mark HIGH and see how that works out.
Since both apps run concurrenty, I am not using the LIBPATHSTRICT, which I think is good news.