I also tried pointing the Tools | Account Settings | Local Folders to a copy of my original local folders.  I still don't see the Folders pane, but I can search for keywords and see some results.  But, I really don't know how many emails, of the many thousands, I actually have available; it looks like a small subset.

My thunderbird (windows 10 64bit) stopped working two days ago; I had not upgraded thunderbird or done anything that I can think of that would have caused this. My local folder had emails which I would really (REALLY) hate to lose, so any help or advice would be sincerely appreciated. I don't remember the version (possibly 91) of thunderbird. If someone can show me how to tell the version, I can let you know. Symptoms: 1. when I start it, I have an empty folder pane, and no thread or message panes 2. the three lines icon in the upper right does nothing 3. the folders "..." does nothing 4. I was able to open the address book and tasks (all looks ok) 5. I was able to start creating a test email, but it would just stall trying to send it 6. the Menu bar seems to be functional I immediately copied the Local Folders folder to another drive for safety, along with the AppData\roaming\thunderbird folder, and the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird folder. I ran several antivirus scans of course (none), ran disk checks of all drives looking for any damage (none), I tried updating my windows 10 and drivers. None of these helped. I tried restarting the apps several times with no success, and tried deleting the folders.json and sessions.json files from the profiles folder with no success (per other reports of similar issue). I tried uninstalling thunderbird, and removing any thunderbird related folders, clearing the registry and then tried reinstalling the latest release (102.4.0). After setting up a single test gmail account, I still had the same symptoms as originally described (empty folder pane, and no thread or messages pane, etc). I tried uninstalling that release, and tried installing other versions with no luck; 102.33, 91.9.1, 107.0.b2. Same symptoms as originally described. With each different release installed, I setup a known working email account (since I can open them directly in a browser). Again, same symptoms as originally described I also tried pointing the Tools | Account Settings | Local Folders to a copy of my original local folders. I still don't see the Folders pane, but I can search for keywords and see some results. But, I really don't know how many emails, of the many thousands, I actually have available; it looks like a small subset. Please, if someone can offer help on recovering the Local Folder or help on showing my Folder and other Panes, I would sincerely appreciate it.