Exporting from Thunderbird, Importing into Thunderbird

I was using Thunderbird as my e-mail program in Ubuntu.  I decided to switch to using Thunderbird 3.1 for Windows as my e-mail program.  It seemed, at this writing, that most people who were transitioning to Thunderbird were going toward Ubuntu, not away from it.  So in this post I am writing up some things that I had to figure out along the way.

I decided to switch to Thunderbird for Windows because I was planning to keep Ubuntu as my underlying operating system, but to focus my applications on Windows XP, which I would be running in a virtual machine in VMware.  This arrangement, I found, gave me dual-boot advantages without having to reboot.

I was particularly interested in using the portable version of Thunderbird as my Windows XP e-mail application.  This would enable me to take my e-mail and my address book with me on a USB flash drive.  The discussion of Thunderbird for Windows in this post relates specifically to the portable version.

After setting up Thunderbird Portable on a Windows computer and making a backup copy, I went into Ubuntu and simply copied over my data.  I found the relevant data in Nautilus (i.e., Ubuntu's File Browser, the equivalent of Windows Explorer), in this location:  Home Folder / .thunderbird / 6abstqrst.default.  (The 6abstqrst part of that name was apparently generated at random, and as such would have a different name in other installations.  Point is, it's the "default" folder.)

I copied that entire default folder to a USB jump drive and compared its subfolders, item by item, to those on the computer where I had installed Thunderbird Portable.  (Of course, I did these and other folder manipulations (below) while Thunderbird was *not* running.)  The comparable e-mail account data seemed especially to be located under the Data\profile\Mail folder.  Thunderbird's Address Book seemed to be in Data\profile\abook.mab.  The Address Book copied and worked without any problem.  The following discussion focuses on problems in getting the e-mail accounts to work correctly.

The simple process of copying e-mail accounts over seemed to work well enough.  I copied all of the folders from Ubuntu via my jump drive to the corresponding Thunderbird folders on the Windows machine.  I kept backups and did this rather painstakingly.  After replacing the contents of one subfolder in Thunderbird Portable with the contents brought over from Thunderbird for Linux, I would start up Thunderbird Portable and make sure that it still seemed to be functioning OK.  Through this process, I ended up with a Thunderbird Portable setup where the desired e-mail accounts did exist.  This may have been helped by the decision to run Thunderbird's Tools > Import option, which I did somewhere along the way.

When I was done, unfortunately, the e-mail accounts that showed up when I ran Thunderbird Portable were still not showing the contents that I wanted them to show.  For example, my Hotmail account was there, but its Inbox was empty, whereas the Hotmail Inbox on Thunderbird for Linux had contained a dozen e-mail messages.  I could see, moreover, that the Data\profile\Mail\pop3.live.com folder contained an Inbox that was 96MB in size.  That was larger than I would have expected, and in any case much larger than an Inbox containing nothing, which is what Thunderbird Portable was showing me.

It seemed that Thunderbird Portable was recognizing the e-mail accounts themselves, but was drawing the contents of those accounts from the wrong place.  I verified this by removing the entire Mail subfolder from Thunderbird Portable.  When I started it up, it was still seeing the same few old items in the same accounts.  I thought it might have observed or figured out where I had moved the Mail folder, so I removed it from that computer entirely; yet Portable was still seeing those same ghostly remnants of some previous state of my Thunderbird for Linux installation.

It took a bit of effort to figure out where those ghostly remains were hanging out.  Portable wasn't drawing them from Data\profile\Cache; they persisted even after I emptied that.  To find the answer, I started Portable, changed the system date to a year in the future, copied one of those old e-mail messages from one folder to another, changed the system date back to the correct year, and exited Portable.  Then I copied the entire Portable folder to a workspace folder elsewhere on the computer, and searched for files bearing that future year's date.  Aside from cache files and scripts, there turned out to be only a handful of files dated in that future year.

That effort led to the discovery that the Data\profile\prefs.js file that I had brought over from Ubuntu was not suited for Windows.  I went to the original backup of my Thunderbird for Windows Portable and copied its prefs.js file to the Portable installation that I was tinkering with, thus overwriting the Ubuntu prefs.js file.  Both of them began with a warning:  "Do not edit this file."  Instead, the warning said, I could follow the instructions provided on a webpage that, as it turned out, was no longer in existence.  A different webpage did advise me to edit prefs.js directly.  Again, of course, I would want to do this while Thunderbird was not running; and if there was any doubt about that, Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del > Processes tab) would confirm whether there was an instance of thunderbird.exe or ThunderbirdPortable.exe currently running.

I opened prefs.js in Notepad, widened the Notepad window to prevent lines from wrapping, and took a look.  I decided I didn't know exactly how to edit prefs.js, so I tried the alternative that the instructions at the top of prefs.js seemed to prefer:  I started Firefox, typed about:config in the address line, and looked to see what was there.  (Note that I did not have any other copies or versions of Thunderbird installed on that computer, else things could have become very confusing.)  I searched for instructions, and eventually realized that it might not make sense to use about:config to change system preferences for a portable program.

So I tried another search.  This led to a webpage that led, eventually, to a mozillaZine webpage that advised me to start over and try using the Kaosmos ImportExportTools utility.  So I made a fresh start, replacing my munged-up Thunderbird Portable with a copy of the backup, and then I installed the ImportExportTools utility as instructed.  Then, in Thunderbird Portable, I went to Tools > ImportExportTools > Import mbox file.  At this point, I had to ask myself:  What, exactly, is an mbox file?  A search led to the discovery that mbox is an e-mail storage format that didn't seem very relevant to Thunderbird's own storage format

To test this, I went ahead with where I was in the ImportExportTools process:  I selected the "Select a directory where searching the mbox files to import (also in subdirectories)" option, and pointed it toward the top level of the folder I had copied over from Ubuntu Thunderbird.  To my surprise, the tool asked me if I wanted to import various programs.  I said no to parentlock and yes to all the other folders it asked me about.  After asking me about those folders, it didn't seem to be doing anything, except that I could see movement in the green progress bar at the bottom of the screen.  When it seemed to be finished, I didn't see any change in Thunderbird's list of folders.  I killed and restarted Thunderbird.  Still no change.  I poked around and then, whoa, I discovered that it had imported everything, including my archives, into the Hotmail Inbox folder (not the actual online one -- just the copy of it that Thunderbird keeps).  I killed T-bird again, made a backup copy of this remarkable state of Thunderbird Portable, restarted the program, and began moving and rearranging folders.

This was looking good, but there were still some things to fix.  First, in T-bird Portable, I tried sending a message that I had kept in the Hotmail drafts folder in Thunderbird for Ubuntu.  I got this message:

Send Message Error
Sending of message failed.
An error occurred sending mail.  Unable to establish a secure link with SMTP server smtp.live.com using STARTTLS since it doesn't advertise that feature.  Switch off STARTTLS for that server or contact your service provider.

A search and then a refined search led to the quick answer that I just had to stop my avast! antivirus software from scanning outgoing messages.

Next, I wanted to get rid of some Local Folders, especially the Inbox and Outbox.  I found a thread that made me think these folders were a product of Smart Folders, which would supposedly combine all of my e-mail inboxes into one Inbox, etc.  I did not want this.  Actually, I wasn't sure this was even the correct explanation, because I was seeing new incoming messages in my Hotmail Inbox, and they were not being mirrored in my Local Folders Inbox.  The advice I got from Yahoo! Answers, usually a font of goofy bewilderment, was as follows:

You can't remove the Smart Folders account using Tools -> Account Settings. You need to either edit prefs.js with a text editor or use the Config editor to delete the account from mail.accountmanager.accounts.

I was inclined to believe this because I had just run across another webpage with more or less the same conclusion.  But the advice on that webpage was oriented toward deleting all local folders, whereas I was using the Local Folders heading as the place to park my e-mail archive.  I right-clicked and saw, from Properties, that Outbox folder was located at Data\profile\Mail\Local Folders\Unsent Messages.  I quit T-bird, made a backup copy of the whole T-bird Portable folder, went into that Local Folders folder in Windows Explorer, and deleted the Unsent Messages entries.  I then restarted T-bird.  No joy.  As expected, the Outbox was still there and the Unsent Messages entries were back.  A new search led to a blanket statement that you could not delete the Outbox because it served an essential function, different from a Drafts folder:  it held messages that the user had tried to send but (because of e.g., no Internet connection) had not yet actually been sent.

So I turned to the next problem arising from the import into Thunderbird Portable for Windows.  I now had two top-level folders appearing at the left side of the T-bird window.  One was for my Hotmail account; the other was for Local Folders.  There should have been a third one, for another e-mail account that had appeared as a top-level folder in T-bird in Ubuntu.  This seemed to be a simple matter of going into T-bird Portable > File > New > Mail Account and entering the information about the account as it was recorded in T-bird for Ubuntu.  But the Mail Account Setup process stayed stuck for a long time on "Looking up configuration:  Trying common server names."  I finally went into Manual Setup and got it working that way.  And with that, the project was done.  I had transitioned from Thunderbird (Ubuntu) to Thunderbird Portable for Windows.

PortableApps in Windows XP

As of summer 2010, a portable application -- what I had been calling a "standalone" program -- was a program that did not have to be "registered" with Windows.  It might not exist on your computer at all until the moment when you would plug in a USB drive containing it, and then you could run it immediately from that drive without having to go through an installation process.  You would also thereby avoid the risk that this would be the straw that broke the camel's back -- the program that would cause Windows to crash.  Moreover, you could thus carry your toolbox around with you, and always have that particular program that you might need for some purpose.  You would also tend to be running lighter software, meaning that a netbook computer might find it easier to run.

Within the world of portable applications for Windows XP (or other operating systems), there was an actual PortableApps (PA) website.  The concept of this enterprise appeared to be that you begin by downloading and installing the PA platform, optionally with a suite of basic programs (e.g., Firefox, OpenOffice), and then you add other portable applications from their directory or elsewhere.

At about the time when I first started paying serious attention to PA, I was in the process of configuring a minimal WinXP virtual machine (VM), and wondered if this way of loading programs would help me to set up a faster and better-functioning VM.  To that end, I decided to err on the heavy side, by installing as many apps as possible on my USB drive.  I had a 4GB Kingston drive available, and if it looked promising I could always buy a larger one.  So, for now, it was a question of what I could get onto that 4GB drive.

I didn't want all of the programs that came with the PortableApps.com suites, so I just downloaded the basic platform, along with a bunch of individual apps.  I installed the basic platform in the root of the 4GB Kingston, following instructions.  It took about a minute.  Then, at the end of that installation process, I launched PA.  It seemed to disappear whenever I used the mouse or keyboard, and after each app installation was completed.  So I kept having to go back to re-run StartPortableApps.exe, there in the root of the USB drive.

To install the individual apps, I went into PA's Options > Install a New App and browsed to each of the .paf.exe (PortableApps format) applications that I had decided to install.  There wasn't a batch process option, so I had to sit there and wait through each of these installations, one by one.  I ran into a problem when I decided to delete one of them.  The problem had to do with administrative rights in Windows XP.  It took a couple of hours to sort out.

Some of these apps had multiple features.  I wasn't familiar with all of them.  It appeared likely that, as I did get to know them, others would become superfluous.  Also, many of these apps had their own additional instructions or informational webpages.  I combined them into a PDF and put a copy on the jump drive itself, for future reference.

The user could right-click on a particular app in PA to pull up a menu of options:  Run, Run as Administrator, Rename, Refresh, Hide, Show Hidden Icons, Favorite, Start Automatically, and Uninstall.  I used the last of those with Sumatra PDF, when I decided in favor of Foxit; but when I said to uninstall, I got an error message:  "Unable to uninstall %APPNAME%."  PA's instructions  said I could just use Windows Explorer to delete the item, followed by the Options > Refresh App Icons menu option in PA.

These difficulties were overshadowed by a much larger problem.  At one point, I took the jump drive out of my computer and tried running it in another computer.  That computer had a different kind of antivirus software than mine.  I think it may have been McAfee.  Whatever it was, it decided that the PortableApps platform was malware, and promptly deleted it.  Presto!  The sleek interface was gone.  The antivirus software also wiped out a couple of individual apps within the PortableApps set.

That pretty much ended my use of PortableApps.com.  Instead, I switched to a different portable applications setup, one that was not quite as slick but was much more robust.

Ubuntu 10.04: IrfanView and Other Portable Apps via Wine

According to Tom Wickline, the process for installing IrfanView 4.23 on Ubuntu 8.04 was just a matter of installing winetricks and MFC42.dll and then installing IrfanView.  I wasn't sure how to do each of those steps, and I wasn't using quite the same setup as he was.  This post traces through my own installation process.

I was using Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I had just downloaded IrfanView 4.27, and thought I would try to install that latest & greatest version.  Also, unlike Tom's system, mine was not "a clean configuration directory, with no other applications or games installed."  According to Ubuntu's System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, I was using Wine 1.2.

My first hurdle was to figure out how to install MFC42.dll.  A WineHQ webpage said that I could get MFC42.dll from Microsoft or via winetricks.  They said I might already have gotten winetricks installed during my Wine installation, but they also said that I could run it even if it wasn't installed; I would just have had to type "sh winetricks" instead of just "winetricks" to run it.  I checked Synaptic.  Sure enough, there it was.  The purpose of winetricks seemed to be to add Windows-friendly support files so that Wine would run Windows programs.  That sounded about right.  The winetricks webpage listed MFC42.dll among the files that it was prepared to help me with.  I went ahead and typed "winetricks mfc42.dll."  That ran and appeared to change some settings.  I went into the wine subdirectory under my Ubuntu user folder:  File System/home/ray/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32.  Tyler Style had said that it needed to be there, but it wasn't.  Amusingly, he had posted that a few months earlier in response to my previous attempt, a year earlier, to get IrfanView running in Ubuntu.  Well, I thought, maybe MFC42.dll had known what it was doing when it installed itself; maybe Tyler was wrong as to the location where it would be found.  The other thing he said that I needed to do was to go into Applications > Wine > Configure Wine > Libraries tab and register MFC42.dll there.  I typed mfc42.dll into the "New override for library" box, at that location, and clicked Add.  It seemed to accept it:  it listed "mfc42 (native, builtin) as an Existing override.  I clicked Apply > OK.

This was fine, for whatever it was worth, but it didn't add IrfanView to my program menu.  To install IrfanView, I had gathered somewhere that I needed to type "wine iview427_setup.exe" to install IrfanView.  I tried that.  It replied with this:

wine: cannot find L"C:\\windows\system32\\iview427_setup.exe"

That raised two questions, which may be summarized as "why not?" and "so what?"  I didn't know why the error message had put that L in front of the C, but whatever; I had since discovered that, in Windows, IrfanView would install as a standalone program, and had therefore moved it to a different partition where I kept all of my Windows standalones (so that I wouldn't have to reinstall them whenever I had to reinstall Windows, but could instead just copy the whole folder to drive D (or whatever) on the new computer.  In other words, I wondered whether I could skip the installation; I wondered whether Wine could run portable or standalone programs.  According to MoebusNet, it could, and one way to make it do that was to download and install PortableApps to the USB drive where you were going to keep your portable programs.  In my case, I wasn't going to keep them on a USB drive; I was going to keep them in a folder on my hard drive.  I wasn't sure how that would work, but I gave it a try.  I downloaded and ran the little 2MB PortableApps Platform.  They said it was self-contained -- PortableApps was, itself, portable -- so I wondered if I could install it on the folder on my hard drive where I kept my other portable programs.  After a brief search, I decided the best way to find out was just to try it.  So when it came time, in the installation process, to choose the install location for PortableApps, I named that folder as the destination.  When the installation finished, in Windows Explorer I copied my IrfanView portable folder to the PortableApps folder.  (I kept a copy in the original location so that it would be available outside of Portable Apps as well.  I thought I would probably prefer to run it that way from my WinXP boot.)  I deleted iv_uninstall.exe from this copy, since I didn't want the uninstaller to show up in PortableApps.  I created a shortcut to PortableAppsPlatform.exe and put that in my Start Menu.  I started up PortableAppsPlatform and, following instructions, clicked on its Options > Refresh App Icons.  I clicked on the IrfanView icon and, sure enough, IrfanView started up.

So now that I had acquired this lovely knowledge about PortableApps, it was time to get back to what MoebusNet had started telling me, about running portable apps in Ubuntu via Wine.  I typed this:

wine "/media/DATA/Standalones/PortableApps/PortableApps.com/PortableAppsPlatform.exe"

and that worked:  IrfanView started up.  So the concept seemed to be that any portable app that I would put into a folder on the same level as the PortableApps.com folder would show up when I ran that command.  So I could make a single PortableApps menu pick for Ubuntu, and it would lead, via PortableApps, to any portable application program that I would set up that way.  I set up a launcher for that wine command by highlighting, right-clicking, and copying it into the Ubuntu Applications menu:  right-click on Applications and choose Edit Menus > Applications > Accessories > New Item.  Name it PortableApps, paste the copied command into the Command box, and Comment it as "Launch portable Windows applications."

This was all wonderful.  But when I tried to play a .wav file in IrfanView, I was still getting the same error message from the previous year, the one that Tyler Style had tried to help me with.  The message read as follows:

IrfanView
Error:  Windows can't play this file!
Windows error text:  Invalid MCI device ID.  Use the ID returned when opening the MCI device..
You can try to install additional video/audio codecs from this site:
http://www.fourcc.org/indexcod.htm
or try the DirectShow option in 'Properties->Video'

The fourcc.org/indexcod.htm webpage seemed to offer video but not audio codecs.  Some Ubuntu documentation pointed me toward the Ubuntu restricted extras repository.  I thought I had already set myself up for everything I could get from there, but the documentation was saying, "Installation only works completely and properly when done from the command-line Terminal. The entire package will not usually install completely from within a Package Manager."  So possibly Synaptic had not brought me all of the codecs I needed.  I killed IngrfanView and then, obeying the documentation, I typed this:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

but it said I already had the newest version.  I could have tried completely removing and reinstalling ubuntu-restricted-extras, but that sounded like it could lead to other difficulties.  Besides, another post made it sound like the codecs might actually be in Medibuntu, which I had also installed.

There were two other things to think about.  One was that I might just try a different audio player.  I posted a question on that.  The other was that I maybe I should take a shot at that actual error message.  What did "Invalid MCI device ID" mean?  Turns out I had posted a bug report on it the previous year.  I posted an update to that bug report.

Meanwhile, in response to the question about an alternative audio player, I got a suggestion to try an older version of IrfanView (namely, 3.98), or to try mpg123 if my reason for wanting IrfanView was to enable skipping to the next file in a folder with just one keystroke.  IrfanView 3.98 dated from 2005, so I would be missing out on some newer functionality.  It didn't seem to be available on the official IrfanView site, but I found numerous other locations for it.  It was a bit harder to find the plugins for version 3.98, but eventually I did.  I installed 3.98 and its plugins on a Windows XP machine and then moved the installed folder over to the Ubuntu machine.  I deleted the previous IrfanView folder from the PortableApps folder, and put this new IrfanView 3.98 folder into PortableApps in its place.  (This time, I didn't keep a copy outside of PortableApps, since I didn't plan to run 3.98 in WinXP.)  Once again, I deleted the Uninstall.exe file from this IrfanView 3.98 folder.  I went to Ubuntu's Applications > Accessories > PortableApps > Options > Refresh and then clicked on IrfanView.  It opened up.  I went to Help > About.  Sure enough, I was now running version 3.98.  To test it, I hit Print Screen.  This opened Ubuntu's Save Screenshot dialog.  I clicked Copy to Clipboard, moused to IrfanView, and hit Ctrl-V.  Sure enough, I had the screenshot in IrfanView.  I tried cropping it (left mouse click / drag / release, Ctrl-Y), set View > Display Options > Fit Images to Window, and, sure enough, IrfanView was functioning normally.  Cool!

To try IrfanView's audio functioning, I navigated to a folder containing several .wav files, double-clicked on the first one, and it played -- in Ubuntu's Totem Movie Player.  Oops.  I right-clicked on the .wav, but Ubuntu wasn't listed as a possibility for the program to play it in.  I went back to PortableApps and started IrfanView again.  I went into its Options > Properties -- but, of course, I had already set those.  So, a problem:  could I get Ubuntu to treat IrfanView as the default viewer or player for a filetype?  My first search didn't turn up much.  PortableApps had a live support chat, but no joy for me there, so I posted a question on it in a PortableApps forum.  Then, resuming my tinkering, I right-clicked on the .wav again and chose Open With > Other Application > Wine Windows Program Loader, but that gave me "Error:  There is no Windows program configured to open this type of file."  Well, I had definitely configured IrfanView to do so, but maybe Wine didn't agree.  I tried a search for that error message, and followed one particularly painful thread from that search.  Somewhere along the way, I got the idea to try Ubuntu's Applications > Wine > Configure Wine > Applications.  With Windows XP as the version of Windows specified at the bottom of the dialog, I clicked on Add Application and navigated to the folder where I had put PortableApps; and in there, I navigated to the IrfanView folder, selected i_view32.exe, and clicked Open > OK.  Now I went back to the original Ubuntu right-click on the .wav, selected Open With > Wine Windows Program Loader . . . and still got the same "no Windows program configured" error.

I had forgotten the option of installing IrfanView as an Ubuntu application via Wine.  Following my steps from a year earlier, I navigated to the IrfanView 3.98 folder and typed "wine i_view32.exe."  But no, that wasn't right; that just ran the portable version.  That command-line approach wasn't necessary anyway; I discovered that I must already somehow have set up Wine to run .exe files automatically, apparently following advice like that provided by a relevant Community Documentation page.  All a bit puzzling.  I continued playing and posting on it, trying to dig my way out.

Meanwhile, I experimented with mpg123.  Some time had passed, and I couldn't remember if I had already installed it, so I just typed "mpg123" at the Ubuntu command line.  This gave me an odd error message:

The program 'mpg123' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:  sudo apt-get install mpg321.

What was odd was that the installation line said mpg321, not mpg123.  I checked Synaptic.  It confirmed that I didn't have mpg123 installed yet, and it also showed me a program called mpg321 on the next line.  The description of the latter characterized it as an "mpg123 clone that doesn't use floating point."  Apparently someone at mpg123 decided that mpg321 was a superior alternative, and thus gave me that command line suggestion to use mpg321 instead.  Just to be sure, I did a search and got the impression that mpg123 began as nonfree software, so mpg321 was prepared as a free alternative and it just became more popular.  I installed both of them in Synaptic, but after playing around with them for a half-hour or more, I was still not getting playlists to work properly.

I found a page listing top Linux music players.  I looked at the webpages for several on that list, but none of the six or eight pages I looked at provided a simple explanation of how the players actually worked -- of whether, to cite an example, you could hit the 6 key on the numeric console at the right end of a standard keyboard to move on to the next file, as you could do in Winamp.  From that list, in the name of trying something rather than nothing, I installed Audacious.  It was a nice enough player, but it did not have the ability to delete a file that I was listening to, as IrfanView did.  It was also not as responsive:  IrfanView would stop immediately when I told it to, so that I could mark a file for resorting or other handling; Audacious would continue on for maybe a second or so, which is not much except when it results in the program's moving on to the next file, which was not the one that I wanted to delete, re-listen to, or otherwise handle.  I decided, once again, that what I wanted was undeniably IrfanView, until further notice.

By this time, Ringi had replied to my latest post in that thread.  It seemed that s/he was doing just fine with the latest version of IrfanView in Ubuntu.  Since there seemed to be no need for 3.98 after all, I deleted the IrfanView 3.98 folder from PortableApps and replaced it (again, without the uninstall.exe) with a copy of 4.27.  Ringi asked whether I had installed IrfanView's plugins, and that was a good question; I was not sure.  Actually, by now I wasn't even sure I had actually installed IrfanView via Wine; it wasn't appearing in Applications > Wine > Programs.  Returning to my notes at the start of this post, I decided that the PortableApps thing was a dead end, at least for purposes of getting IrfanView to run the way I wanted.

I went back, specifically, to the advice (above) that I needed to type "wine iview427_setup.exe" to install IrfanView.  In Terminal, I navigated to the original setup folder (i.e., not the unpacked, ready-to-run standalone folder) where I had stored iview427_setup.exe and irfanview_plugins_427_setup.exe.  I typed that  Wine command:  "wine iview427_setup.exe."  It said, "err:module:import_dll Library MFC42.DLL (which is needed by L"D:[path]\iview427_setup.exe") not found."  So, OK.  I had not correctly installed MFC42.DLL after all.  Following the Winetricks instructions, I typed "sh winetricks mfc42.dll."  I got an error:  "Can't open winetricks."  I verified, in Synaptic, that I did have cabextract installed.  Synaptic also confirmed that I had winetricks installed.  Nonetheless, following those instructions, I typed "wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks."  It ran.  I tried "sh winetricks mfc42.dll" again.  This time, it said, "Unknown arg mfc42.dll," followed by a list of the packages that it did have.  Oops:  just plain mfc42, not mfc42.dll.  I retried:  "sh winetricks mfc42."  It ran without error.  So, interesting:  it seemed that Synaptic (or whatever approach I had used previously) had not done the job of installing winetricks properly.  Now I got a dialog for "VCRedist Installation."  I okayed through that; something ran in Terminal; and it concluded with this statement:  "Install of mfc42 done.  Winetricks done."  Cool.  I had finished the mfc42 part.  Now back, once more, to "wine iview427_setup.exe."  This gave me the IrfanView Setup dialog.  I set it to install for all users in C:\Program Files\IrfanView\.  It completed, and IrfanView was up and running.  I killed it and typed "wine irfanview_plugins_427_setup.exe."  That ran OK, and now I had an IrfanView entry in Applications > Wine > Programs.  I started IrfanView and set its options, including naming it as the default handler for all audio files.

So IrfanView now seemed properly set up for sure.  In IrfanView, I did a File > Open.  It was listing only image files, but I changed it to show all files, and then tried to play one of the .wav files in that folder.  It gave me the "Error:  Windows can't play this file!" message again, same as before.  I killed IrfanView, double-clicked on a .wav file in Nautilus, and the file played -- in Totem!  It certainly appeared that I had installed IrfanView correctly -- at least once, if not multiple times -- and yet it was still not functioning properly for me in Ubuntu.  I returned to a Wine bug report that I had started to file a year earlier.  I didn't know how to file bug reports, but I gave it a whirl.  The concept seemed to be that you get a debug trace on the uncooperative program.  In this case, that seemed to call for going to the folder where I had installed portable IrfanView and running the following command:

WINEDEBUG=+relay,+seh,+tid wine i_view32.exe &> /tmp/output.txt

That opened IrfanView and waited while I repeated the steps I had taken:  open a .wav file, get a repeated error message, etc.  When I closed IrfanView, the output file was there.  But when I looked in it, it only contained repeated instances of this message:  "fixme:mciwave:MCIWAVE_DriverProc Unsupported yet command [2115]."  That last number changed, in each of the six repetitions of that message:  2115, 2114, 2132, 2114, 2132, 2132.  Maybe that was all it was supposed to say.  Whatever.  I attached the output.txt file to the bug report and sent it off.  Meanwhile, I posted a link to this note in the discussion thread, in case Ringi or someone else felt like reviewing it and possibly detecting what I had done wrong.