What do you mean by 'locked'? Thunderbird is not dependent on donations in order to run.

Just got your e-mail today as I figured out how to partially negotiate the damage. Multiple e-mail box folder scrambled with many folders deleted. All archives mingled and scrambled. Donations page popped up immediately. Seeking how this gets done, Who and why. Can you help as their does not seem to be any protection from it happening again.

That's hard to give a solid answer to. Thunderbird lives with many other applications on the PC, and antivirus software may sometimes interfere. And sometimes a bug in software contributes. My personal approach is to backup periodically to mitigate any problems.