Temporary Move Does Not Work (Solved)

[John Liebson]

About a month ago, Dell installed a new network card on my computer, which has never worked. After many hours fighting with their tech support, which blamed entirely too many fallacious causes, yesterday they finally agreed to send the unit to their depot for repair. So that I would have access during the interregnum, I created a new user on my wife's computer; as hers is named "John," a holdover from an older computer, I named the new user "Me."

I copied my Thunderbird app data to a USB, and used that to copy everything to Me; it does not work: When I try to access the profile, I get an error message that the profile cannot be loaded as it may be missing or inaccessible. Here is what profiles.ini reads on my computer:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/b5kxwlkj.default

[Profile1]
Name=16Sept2014
IsRelative=0
Path=C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\8an20lo4.16Sept2014
Default=1

I changed John in the path to Me, which I thought would enable Tb to work as it does on my computer; the problem is likely that I thought, often a bad thing.

The profile b5... is there, and when I try to open Tb through a Run command -p, 16Sept2014 shows up, but, as i wrote just above, choosing that does not work. What do I need to do to get this to function, as part of my temporary setup before I ship my computer to Dell?

[tanstaafl]

Perhaps [Profile0] is invalid or there is some problem with the profile it points to. Thunderbird will not tolerate any errors in the profiles.ini file, even for unused profiles. I assume you only want to use Profile1 from now on. I suggest you initially try deleting the [Profile0] entry and rename [Profile1] to [Profile0].

If that doesn't help delete the profiles.ini file and then tell Thunderbird where the profile is per http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_p ... hunderbird

[John Liebson]

Thanks, tan...

I had looked at that tutorial, but have just bookmarked it for future perusal, as I don't have the time now.

The profile works correctly on my computer; during the copying process, I did see some messages that some files could not be copied, such as prefs.js, but the size of the profile and the number of files and folders of the original and the copied version are identical, complete with a prefs.js (which I did not open to see what is in it.)

I'll see tomorrow if I can, following your advice, get this thing to work. I have had a month of frustration in dealing with Dell, and was really hoping that my copying the Tb info to Me would go well (and, so too, for Fx,) so that I can quickly get the programs that I really want and/or need to use for the seven to ten days that Dell quotes for depot work. I can certainly do without many of my lesser programs.

[John Liebson]

Success, after a very strange failure. I am not at all sure what happened, nor do I really care: Tb stopped working, so I removed it and reinstalled it, in order to start over. That is when the problem arose: I tried to start Tb, only to be told that the profile was either not there or was damaged (or something of that nature.) Given that this was with a new install after the removal, I was totally confused (yes, I know that that is a permanent, personal problem.)

After pondering for a while, I checked, and found that there was a new profile.ini and a new profile. How the new profile.ini had an entry for a profile that did not exist is really weird. I changed that to the name of the new profile, start Tb, went to troubleshooting, open the profile, and overwrote its contents with those of the working Tb profile on my computer, following the instructions in the Kb tutorial (which were not entirely clear, but I did figure them out.)

Tb on my wife's computer is working as clone of Tb on my computer.