Did you make sure the name for the (possibly) newly created profile data folder meets the name in the profiles.ini file? And did you need to set up the accounts? (If you did, you might be using the new profile instead.) In other words, if you copied the entire profile data folder from the other setup and restored that to the new one, profiles.ini should of course contain that exact name too, or be copied from the old setup as well to ease that. Perhaps you referred to using the -p option just to create a new profile before running Thunderbird, as described in [[Moving Thunderbird Data to a New Computer]]? (Side note: that article was changed and approved recently but may still be confusing and incomplete - it might be better to have a look at the [[Profiles - Where Thunderbird stores your messages and other user data]] article and look at the "Restoring to a different location" section instead.) If you allowed Thunderbird to set up a new profile that probably has a different name, edit the profiles.ini file to make the profile name match the other folder name, or add it to that file as a second profile. The -p option is not really used for data recovery, but only for the profile selection, as defined by the profiles.ini file. Theoretically, nothing should be lost if you just copy the entire profile folder ''and'' the profiles.ini file from one Windows setup to another. Does this help?