You need to be more specific to receive help. Did you install thunderbird from Windows or from Thunderbird? They're very different. To verify that, click help>troubleshootinginformation and post screenshot.

I installed through Chocolatey (choco install thunderbird), it's how I manage apps on MSWin. I would have to power up the machine I tried this on (so I don't have to constantly reboot my primary system)

Please respond to my question on help>troubleshootinginformation. thank you

Screenshot here, I also exported the text from troubleshooting info:

Ok, it's the real thing. I suggest copying your exported profile to c:\users\<yourid>\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles Rename it so that it is unique for you start thunderbird and click help>troubleshootinginformation scroll down to 'profiles' and click 'about:profiles" click the 'create profile button click next enter a short name, such as MYPROFILE click the 'choose' button and select your profile, the one you copied in and finish and launch

Did you copy your profiles.ini and profiles directory into %AppData%\Thunderbird ?

Did you modify your profiles.ini directory Path to reflect the directory on Windows ( Path= ) if needed ?

Tried David's step above; once I created the new profile pointing to the copy of my Linux profile directory, it took a minute or so and then failed with a message window:

     XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
     Location: chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xhtml
     Line Number 4848, Column 9:
             menupopup is="folder-menupopup" id="menu_GoFolderPopup"

As per Michel T's message, I had made sure the path included the "profile\..." (I am presuming you meant %AppData%\Roaming\Thunderbird). Also tried letting it create a new profile.ini file and profile directory, and then changed the profile.ini to refer to my transferred directory rather than the one it created.

So the only two outcomes I've gotten is the XML Parsing error, or it wants to create an entirely new profile rather than using my transferred one.