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The problem is that Thunderbird doesn't find the profile where it's supposed to be.

What exactly is (was?) in your "recovered files" folder? And where did you move it to?

The profile that I believe I want is named e00qmtzd.default and it is in C:\Restore\Bill\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles. There are many other files in the Restore folder but I don't believe they are related to this problem. I moved e00qmtzd.default to C:\users\Bill\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles.

I have reinstalled Thunderbird 24.4.0 and it appears to load correctly until the last step when I try to open it and get the message that the profile cannot be loaded.

I don't know what else to do. I even went into Troubleshoot for Firefox and restored it to the default settings. That didn't solve the problem.

There is no point messing with Firefox when you have a Thunderbird problem.

Moving e00qmtzd.default to C:\users\Bill\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles sounds about right.

When you go up one level in the folder hierarchy to C:\users\Bill\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird, there should be a file profiles.ini.

What's the contents of profiles.ini?

This is usually caused by a problem with the profiles.ini file and the profile marked as Default=1 in this file is no longer present on the hard drive.

• %AppData%\Mozilla\Thunderbird\
  C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Thunderbird\Profiles

You can use one of these to make Thunderbird use an existing profile:

• Use "Choose Folder" when you create a new profile to select the location of a lost profile and recover this profile

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

I think I have finally figured out how to reply to you. Even though your email says to reply to no-reply@mozilla.org, that just goes into dead space.

So to answer your question, the profiles.ini file has in it:

{General}
StartWithLastProfile=1

{Profile0}
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/ghdigdus.default

Also, I want to mention that there is a Thunderbird folder in C:\ just above the Users folder. It has two profiles in it, one of which is the e00qmtzd.default folder.

Are we getting closer to solving this problem?

Do you still have the ghdigdus.default folder that is listed in the profiles.ini file?

If not then that is probably causing this error message and you can replace the ghdigdus.default by e00qmtzd.default in the profiles.ini file.

Hooray. I think we are getting closer. By deleting ghdigdus.default and substituting e00qmtzd.default, Thunderbird finally opens!

However, none of my many old folders (except for Inbox) appear. I have the same e00qmtzd.default folder in my Restore folder and when I click on it, I see the old folders I would like to restore. Can I move them to the e00qmtzd.default folder in C:\ that now opens in Thunderbird?

How do I restore my address books?

Thanks for your help so far. It looks as if we are almost there!

Is that in the recycle bin and is that a full profile folder?

See:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

If that is the case then try to rename the current e00qmtzd.default folder to e00qmtzd.default.old and restore the e00qmtzd.default from the recycle bin (Restore folder) to see if that works.

There is an e00qmtzd.default folder in the recycle bin and it is 1.43 GB. However, there is a Restore folder in C:\ that has an e00qmtzd.default folder that is 2.19 GB and it contains 295 files, 24 folders. Wouldn't that be the one to restore?

When I rename the current e00qmtzd.default folder to e00qmtzd.default.old, do I need to move it somewhere else?

No. It isn't necessary to move the e00qmtzd.default.old for now.

You can leave it in place and restore the e00qmtzd.default from the C:\Restore folder.

OK, cor-el. That worked and I am now back in business. What a relief! Thanks so much for all your help and expertise and let's hope I never have the problem again.