Opera

You may be reading this article because you received the error message "There was a problem initializing Opera Mail. Engine Init() Failed". The most likely reason for this error message is that you have a single-user installation of Opera.

When installing Opera on Windows, you are strongly advised to choose a multi-user installation. A single user installation will install your profile in the folder Program Files, which is not writeable unless you are the system administrator.

One solution to the problem is to convert your single-user installation of Opera to a multi-user installation of Opera. But first, you need to be certain that you have a single-user installation. To do so, select the menu item Help > About Opera, and consider the paths. If your Mail directory is located in Program Files, you have a single-user installation of Opera.

To change to a multi-user installation of Opera, follow these steps:

1. take note of the file paths shown in Help > About Opera [1]
2. close Opera
3. open 'OperaDef6.ini' from the main Opera folder in a plain text editor
4. change the line 'Multi-user=0' to 'Multi-user=1'
5. save and close 'OperaDef6.ini'
6. restart Opera, and you should have clean new profile folders under the 'Application data' folders for the current user
7. take note of the file paths shown in Help > About Opera [1]
8. close Opera
9. copy the Profile and Mail folders from the main Opera folder to the directories noted above, replacing the newly created profile files (these can be overwritten)
10. 9.5: note that the profile subfolders 'bt_metadata', 'cache4', 'images', 'opcache', 'voicelib', 'vps' will go to the profile folder under '\Local settings\Application data'
11. 9.5: note that the Mail folder will also go under '\Local settings\Application data'
12. open 'opera6.ini' from the new Profile folder in a plain text editor
13. update all the file paths you find there to match the new locations
14. save and close 'opera6.ini'
15. done

[1] Default folder locations for multi-user installations when using Windows XP

• main (installation) folder is likely 'C:\Program files\Opera\'
• profile folders can usually be found at one of the following locations:
  • 'C:\Documents and settings\username\Application data\Opera\Opera\profile\'
  • 'C:\Documents and settings\username\Local Settings\Application data\Opera\Opera\profile\'
  The latter is used by 9.5 installations for data not suited for inclusion in a roaming profile.
• the mail directory is usually one of the following:
  • 'C:\Documents and settings\username\Application data\Opera\Opera\mail\'
  • 'C:\Documents and settings\username\Local Settings\Application data\Opera\Opera\mail\'
  depending on whether you started with 9.5 or an earlier Opera version.