Thunderbird's annoying "Collected Addresses"

I know, Mozilla Thunderbird is not a Microsoft product, but annoyance is epidemic...
By default, Mozilla Thunderbird creates two address books: the "Personal Address Book" and the "Collected Addresses" one. This can be quite confusing, especially for newbies, at least because new addresses may be automatically stored in the "Collected Addresses" book leaving the unexperienced user unable to retrieve them.
It is no suprise, therefore, that getting rid of the latter would be sometimes highly desirable!
Unfortunately neither of these address books can be deleted without being recreated by the program, yet there is a way of somewhat doing it by "emulating" the delete operation:

First, Open the "prefs.js" file.
Thunderbird prefs.js location:
VISTA: C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default
XP / 2000 / 7: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default

For the "Personal Address Book", you can't delete it but you can rename it to use it as a "custom" address book. To do that, go to the bottom of the "prefs.js" file and simply add this line:

user_pref("ldap_2.servers.pab.description", "<New Name>");

Replace "<New Name>" by the name you want to give it. For example,

user_pref("ldap_2.servers.pab.description", "Friends");

Next... to "delete" the "Collected Addresses" book, all you have to do is add this line to the end of the "prefs.js" file:

user_pref("ldap_2.servers.history.description", "");

Leaving the quotation marks empty at the end of the line will make the book "disappear" like magic!

The above trick is quoted as is from the following very useful reference:
How to delete all the address books of Thunderbird?

Autoupdate annoyances

On my openSUSE laptop I sometimes run Windows XP in a Virtualbox. A couple of days ago I noticed problems while automatically updating the system: namely, a lot of patches could not be installed because the cryptographic service was not started. After investigating I was able to restart it, and though something to be fixed still persists, I found the following link very useful:

How To Fix The "Cryptographic Service Error"