Current frustrations with Thunderbird

I'm currently plagued by the following showing up in my error console in Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 (20080914).

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80550006 [nsIMsgFolder.getMsgDatabase]" nsresult: "0x80550006 ()" location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/mailWidgets.xml :: parseFolder :: line 2061" data: no]

The other thing that happens is that eventually, Thunderbird stops talking (hangs) to my IMAP mail server (over SSL). So I'm unable to send e-mail messages over SMTP/SSL (port 465), or am I able to retrieve any messages from our IMAP (Dovecot over SSL) server until I restart Thunderbird.

It can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours for this problem to occur. Starting in safe mode fixes some of the issue, but Thunderbird still chokes up after I've hit a few dozen IMAP folders to get new headers and to download messages.