thunderbird pegs and hogs hard drive disc io

[thufir]

I switched pc's, so Thunderbird has to download n e-mails for imap 
archive, and this both takes time and hogs resources.  Ok, that's fine.

However, it renders this pc unusable to the point where I left it for an 
hour, still the hard drive was pegged to the point where the console 
wouldn't respond, I had to use REISUB.  Also, the disc was under so much 
usage that it was a bit alarming.

I want thunderbird to download archives, I have it set to just archive 
the last few days, but downloads headers.  How can I limit this?

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz

iotop showed thundebird, and, oddly, firefox -- both at 99% or so of 
resources.  I put it almost entirely down to thunderbird.

I've rebooted, and am going to go through tbird to make sure it's not 
trying to archive everything, but this seems a bit unprecedented.  Any 
pointers/logs to look at/etc?


thanks,

Thufir