T12 installed

You might try running icedove in the terminal via strace.
'strace icedove'
'strace -Z icedove' might only spit out system failures.

Thanks Geshmy. That did produce a wildly fast-scrolling terminal terminal output, at least. I'm not sure how or why, but Icedove stopped crashing for a moment. Then it started crashing again.

I also tried running Icedove in the Troubleshooting mode. No use - it crashed. Any different ideas welcome.

Multiple kern.log complaints like this--

2026-08-24T17:45:32.153448-05:00 0em-thinkpad kernel: audit: type=1400 audit(1787611532.150:168): apparmor="AUDIT" operation="userns_create" class="namespace" info="Userns create - transitioning profile" profile="unconfined" pid=9642 comm="icedove" requested="userns_create" target="unprivileged_userns"

2026-08-24T19:39:45.678416-05:00 0em-thinkpad kernel: audit: type=1400 audit(1787618385.676:204): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="open" class="file" profile="libreoffice-soffice" name="/home/oem-thinkpad/.icedove/installs.ini" pid=12202 comm="pool-soffice" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=1000 ouid=1000

Strace output for 5 minutes.

Maybe at some point you could give a try to the workaround and create a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf file with the following content:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "Intel"
  Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

It is known to have fixed similar issues on many X200 laptops and has been documented in the wiki.

https://trisquel.info/es/forum/x11-close-session-when-opening-file-or-browsing-web
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/abrupt-closing-graphical-session-after-various-user-actions-systems-intel-graphic-card

Would this work?

You can open up a two windows in your filemanager and put them side by side and have one at new home directory and the other at OEM-Thinkpad home directory and begin copying the latter and pasting to the other directory by directory. Of course you have to navigate in both windows in sync.

Then you can delete the OEM-Thinkpad directory.

So newhome/Music in one, OEM-Thinkpad/home/Music in the other with focus on the that one, Ctrl - A to select all, Ctrl -C to copy then focus on first window and Ctrl -V to paste. Or use Edit on the menu bar for each window. I just had to do this using pcmanfm.

Thanks Geshmy. This would work, but I was hoping for something less risky. It took forever to transfer this data with USB 2.0!

Actually, I think usb 2.0 will be slow but now that is there on your hard drive it will be much faster. Anyway, good luck. Maybe some of the strong coders that stop in here have an answer for you.

I just realized there is an easier faster way using the two windows.
Have the first showing your home directory.
Put the second window in OEM.../Music.
Focus on OEM window > Ctrl A to select all
Then Click and hold on any one of the selected items and
drag it to the Music folder in the first window until the Music Directory is highlighted.
Repeat for each directory in The OEM... folder.

That way all the system has to do is change the path to the data you have already copied to the hard drive.

Geshmy-thanks!

Glad I could help!

Well, the system is running smoothly BUT still crashing randomly. I ran all hardware tests including memtest86+ from a rescue USB PASSED, testdisk PASSED, stressapptest PASSED, stress ng PASSED, tested power supply for 24 hrs without battery-no problem. I did the X11 fix. It worked fine. I am now out of hardware tests, so I am running another distro from a live USB to see how that works. The only hardware fault in the logs is an mce error indicating that Libreboot is installed. Any suggestion welcome!

Maybe it needs a cleaning. A long time ago I had similar problem resolved on an old PC by removing the case and cleaning it with a can of compressed air. Other than that, I don't know. Would be nice to resolve this as random crashes aren't good.

Thanks Geshmy. I am going to bite the bullet and replace the thermal paste and thermal pad in my X200 this week. (There is a thermal pad on the GPU, but it seems that most people don't replace it. I bought some just in case.) I'll take the opportunity to inspect the electrolytic and tantalum caps on the board. And do a thorough cleaning. I may well break something, but Thinkpad parts are cheap. Wish me luck.

re 'I may well break something'

Take your time and exercise all caution :)

Success! The re-pasted the CPU on my venerable X200. I didn't even break anything. While I was at it, I installed a replacement wifi card and performed a thorough cleaning.

I was a bit concerned when the computer was eerily silent at startup. But the fan was running at a very low speed. CPU is running much cooler, about 50C degrees after a 15 minute Youtube video. Fan speed is generally much lower.

The old thermal grease, which is what Lenovo called it in the manual, was sloppily applied by the previous tech. It cleaned up easily. I replaced the thermal pad which was intact but about 25% too big.

Pix attached. Thanks!

Nice! I see that laptops do shutdown when they overheat so hopefully you will be all good now.

As part of my re-pasting project, I noticed that my HDD was from 2013. This spurred me to finally buy an SSD, a Kingston A400 with 480 gb. I also bought a USB enclosure for the HDD/SDD.

I haven't cloned a drive in probably 15 years, so I am being careful.

I have a System Rescue USB stick and could clone the disk using ddrescue. Or I could (1) do a fresh install of Trisquel and (2) move my Home directory to the new disk. Which would be better?

Thanks!
_____________________

Edit- I opted for a completely clean install of Trisquel and copied my Home directory to the new SSD. Everything works. The machine is running cool now. Thus ends the saga. Thanks!

Thanks Magic Banana. I opted to reinstall Trisquel from a USB stick and the transfer my Home directory via another USB stick. It worked, kinda, but I am still tinkering. My X200 is running cool, but a strange issue cropped up today. Icedove crashes to the login screen whenever I email my sister, who is on gmail. Weird thing is, I can email my own gmail account from Icedove and it works fine. My webmail works fine when I email my sister's gmail account.

I thought it was the Xorg screen tearing issue because I had not yet reinstalled the fix. I just reinstalled it, and Icedove still crashes - but only when emailing my sister. Still trying to figure this out.

As far as backups, I don't have one I can trust right now. I only have a copy of my Home directory on a USB stick, and my old HDD in a USB enclosure. This is clearly suboptimal. I had been using Backups feeding my Google drive, but the Backup ballooned to near 200 gigs. My Home directory is a small fraction of this size. I had a setting wrong. So I am looking for a new backup solution, maybe NAS of some kind. I am open to any suggestions!