Porting Thunderbird

Computer started dying last week. It had enough life left to back stuff up to CD before giving up the ghost. Luckily I had a spare computer, in fact, several of them, laptops abandoned by the children when they bought new. There was an HP unit that seemed to have a bit of life left in it. It was sluggish and out of disk space, but after removing a zillion games, Dragon Naturally Speaking, and running Windows Update for hours and hours, it became much more usable.
So, mission for the day, get my back email, my address book, my filters, and signature block off the CD's and into Thunderbird on the new machine. Thunderbird wants to serve multiple users, keeping each user's email and address books separate. To make this happen, Thunderbird keeps everything associated with a user in the user's private file space. So, with Explorer, cruise out to the C drive Documents and Settings/your_own_name/application_data/Thunderbird. Sometimes "Mozilla Thunderbird"
Go down one more level to "Profiles". On the old machine, copy "profiles" and all it's subdirectory out to CD to make the trip to the new machine. Under "Profiles" there will be one, maybe more, directories with computer generated names. If just one, your have found it, If more than one, you have to find the one containing your up-to-date stuff. Check the date stamps inside the directories or look inside a file profiles.ini in the "profile" directory.
On the new machine, install Thunderbird, and examine the "profile" directory it creates afresh. You should be able to now copy the computer generated name sub directory off the CD and into the new "profiles" directory, edit the file pointer in the "profiles.ini" file to point to the newly imported subdirectory and be done with it.
For some reason this didn't work. Each time I tried it, Thunderbird would get sick and refuse to start. The winning strategy is instead to copy the important files off the CD and into the newly created computer generated name directory. File abook.mab is your address book. Your various mail pouches (inbox, trash, sent, etc) are represented by pairs of files e.g. inbox and inbox.msf. You now copy the pairs of files off the CD onto the hard drive. Be sure to get msgfilterRules.dat off the CD if you use message filters.
After four hours of trial and error I got my old address book, with it's mailing lists, barrels of old mail, and all the message filters up on the new machine. My tricky signature file with a pointer to this blog got lost somewhere, but the rest of the stuff works. The message filters needed editing of their target mail pouch after the move.