AHHH, disaster! All Thunderbird email accounts nuked!! What happened?

[teddyFBI]

So I noticed my computer was lagging, so I went to the process-list and saw that the CPU usage was 99%, and that most of that was being taken up by thunderbird.exe (which happens from time to time for me), so I ctrl-alt-del killed the thunderbird.exe process, and reopened it.

Then this is what I saw:



Yep, it's acting as though this is the very first time I've ever opened Thunderbird, and I don't have any of my email accounts set up, when previously I had TEN (yes ten) set up in there that will take forever to re-create. I'm not so worried about the email messages being lost, b/c they're stored on an IMAP server, which I was just using Thunderbird to pull them from, but it will take FOREVER to set up Thunderbird like I had it before.

How could this have happened? I don't see how just killing the .exe process (which i've done several times before when i had this problem) could just nuke the entire program back to the state it was in when i originally downloaded it...!

Halp!

p.s. I rebooted my computer to no avail [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[epiphanot]

Is your address book still intact? if so, go here

The profile folder is located in the application data folder for Thunderbird:

* On Windows Vista/XP/2000, the path is %AppData%\Thunderbird\
* On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Thunderbird\
* On Linux, the path is ~/.thunderbird/
* On Mac OS X, the path is ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/

[teddyFBI]

Wow, awesome link -- here's what happened:
I found the Profile Folder that page pointed me to, but that's where i stopped following their directions b/c i saw 2 files in the folder, one named prefs.js (and had been modified at 6:40pm), and the other named prefs-1.js, which had been modified at 3pm, around the time Thunderbird had crashed on me. The prefs.js one was like 1KB in size, while the prefs-1.js file was 20kb in size, so I surmised that Thunderbird had somehow created the prefs-1.js file as a backup when i had killed the thunderbird.exe process, and that it still contained my Profile (b/c my address book was still intact, as that link explained). So all I did was rename prefs-1.js to prefs.js and started thunderbird, and voila! all is well.

epiphanot - if u want to PM me your s/n on Stars or FTP, I'll send you $5 for helping me fix this. Saved me so much time, thanks!