Two Identical Profiles Created - first does not work - How do I delete

Check this article to locate your profile folder(s).

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird#Windows_Vista_and_7

Check via Troubleshooting Information what's the profile you currently use.

Then delete the other (non working) profile.

Start the Profile Manager.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_manager

Delete the orphan entry of the profile you deleted above.

In the profiles folder, there is only one (default) profile. I tried to delete that and Thunderbird will not even start, I had to undo the delete to make it work again, somehow... there are two inbox entries, inbox and inbox.mfs If you look, there are not as many folders on the left side in Thunderbird as the online picture shows. Can this folder be deleted and reinstalled? i will start from scratch if possible

The regular inbox folder shows 87.9MB, so it has the mail in it, but it cannot be opened. There is one more inbox folder with a small file size (inbox msf) should I delete the second inbox folder?

I changed the name of the first profile to John Doe so I would be able to find it, but it never showed up in the tree view

Let's start over. I'm not seeing anything that leaves me confident that you're using the word "profile" in any way I'd recognize. What steps did you go through to create this second "profile"?

Can you describe what you did, but without using the word "profile"? ;-)

Accounts are recorded in the tree folders by the server names, not user names nor account names. So your AT&T account is stored as inbound.att.net.

In the other post, I used the word Profile instead of E-Mail Account. My mistake.

I typed out a very detailed description of the problem and how i created the e-mail accounts, but just when I tried to post it with this screenshot, it just disappeared. It is strange because the picture showed up.

when I first opened Thunderbird, I did not create an account. I just clicked on: "I think I will configure my account later". Then I looked around at the settings and tried to set Thunderbird so it would not download all my online mailbox to my computer. ( I used a setting to check for messages but leave my mail in my online inbox, or something similar) I may have changed some other settings while there because when I restarted it and on the create new e-mail address page I selected: "Skip this and use my existing e-mail" and entered my att account, it would not connect to my webmail account. I restarted it again and created a second e-mail account with the same e-mail address and it connected and downloaded all my online inbox, which I did not want it to do. Then I tried to delete the original e-mail account, but was unable to find any way to delete that first e-mail account . I changed the name of the first e-mail account to John Doe So I could try to find it in the tree, but it does not show up in the tree. This is a much shorter version of what I typed earlier, but I am not going to even try to go into detail like that again because I wasted an entire night trying to type it up and it just disappeared when i tried to post it.

In this screenshot, it has inbox, and inbox.mfs. Am I supposed to delete one or both of these?

If this doesn't work, I give up. Too bad, it took me all night to type out the previous reply that is now gone.

so you only have one email account showing in Thunderbird. So what is the issue?

Tools menu (ALt+T) > account settings. If you have two email accounts they will show thee, but seriously I think you only have one.