when moving from pop to imap

How exactly did you move from POP to IMAP?

my profile was moved to an imap folder.

See this article what a profile is all about. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data

Now I can't see those messages.

With IMAP you do see all messages on the server. Which messages are missing?

THank you for your response to my dilemma. On my desktop, I can see the subfolders I developed in thunderbird (with the pop protocol) under my profile under mail.twc.com, but they are not being picked up by thunderbird and shown in my mail when i run the program. I now have those files directly under my profile.default folder on my desktop.

Initially i removed the pop accounts and re-entered them as imap accounts. i am now receiving new mail ok, but can't retrieve my old folders into thunderbird.

Initially i removed the pop accounts

That was a mistake. You have two options now:

• recover the POP account to get access to the messages. You could then move them to your Local Folders account, and delete the POP account.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Recover_Deleted_Account

• import them into Local Folders using this add-on

https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

In any case, you could then also upload the messages to the server.