Thunderbird crashed after checking profile folder, now no accounts

Question

I was checking the Troubleshooting to locate the Profiles folder to back up. I clicked on "about plugins" to see if there were any plugins installed by default and TB crashed. It would not restart until I restarted the computer, then when launched it wanted to created an account. Both accounts previous created were gone. I found the profiles folder and it has 2 folders with random nos in the titles. I tried the command line profile manager and created a new profile with choosing the copied folder I had. TB would not start. When I chose a subfolder beneath Profiles it did start and my 2 accounts were back with the emails and folders I created. I went to the Troubleshooting again and clicked on the about link and it happened again!
Should I remove and re-install TB again to be safe? What is the best way to backup the emails? I could not find where you would import old emails from either TB or Outlook. We have a backup of emails from our work computer we need to import on the laptop eventually. I need to work this out before I install TB on our laptop that has an email account with many old emails that need to be kept. We are trying to get away from using the AOL Desktop application!

Answer 1

reinstalling does not effect mails or any other data as the profiler is not changed by the process.
If it crashed there should be a crash it for someone to look at, Could you post it.
The plugin information is all retrieved from the registry and is basically shared with Firefox. Unless you modify it you will have none active in Thunderbird. If you do not have Firefox installed however it might be there is no registry hive to read causing the crash. Are you using Firefox or have it installed.
Go to this link and see what is installed. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/