Could you check to see whether your original settings folder was preserved? Exit Firefox completely, then start up in the Profile Manager as follows:

Start > Run > firefox.exe -ProfileManager

(Note: there is a space between exe and the hyphen.)

If you have multiple profiles, try the "default" one, etc. Can you find an intact settings folder you were using before?

Forgot to write in the question that I'd already tried what you are suggesting - just one Firefox profile is left with the default settings. After the reboot it seems everything just reset itself to defaults:/

I've never heard to Firefox resetting a profile to default just because it crashed. If Firefox ran its internal Reset feature to recover, it may have created an "Old Firefox settings" folder on your desktop.

How come? - every forum has entries of people who say the same - firefox after computer's hard reboot, or 'cos of other reasons (eg addons) resets itself to defaults. And as I said I double checked - one profile left with clean defaults, no trace of any personalization or previously installed addons and their content. I'm in real despair, should learn my lesson to back up everything of any importance - yet, that doesn't solve my problem.

You could try an "unerease"/"undelete" type program like http://www.piriform.com/recuva These are designed to recover files that were erased and do not appear in the recycle bin. They only work well if you run them as soon as possible, having made as few changes or updates to your PC as possible.

Tried Recuva, it recovered some files, all rubbish. I lost hope. I tried system restore like someone else suggested and messed it even more - lost all favourites too

Sorry to hear about the system restore. Microsoft doesn't store Firefox's settings folders as part of its snapshot, so that isn't a useful tool for most Firefox problems.

If you do not have Old Firefox Settings on your desktop, AND you do not have an old profile folder in the usual location, AND the undelete utility didn't turn up any Firefox related files, then it's completely baffling where your profile folder went.

Unless... Do you have multiple users defined at the Windows level?

Hi, thanks again for your interest. Yeah I messed things up even more with the system restore, as it cleared previous restore points due to lack of disc space. I looked in the profile folder again and there are now 5 profile folders, one - default. The Profile Manager tho' sees only the default one for some reason. Recuva did turn up a few hundred files (I worked it only on the firefox profiles folder) and said some of those could only be retrieved partially but I don't know what to do now. I just saved those files in a folder on another disc (not the system disc). I use the computer as admin, there's no other user accounts as far as i checked.

I think the profile manager only sees what is listed in the file profiles.ini which is one level up from the Profiles folder.

For salvage operations, this article might help, at least as to the general files in the folders: Recover important data from an old profile. I'm not familiar with how Pocket stores its data. It may have created one or more files in the main profile folder, or it might have created a subfolder of its own. Some add-ons are system global (e.g., Roboform) and store their main data entirely outside the Firefox profile folder. Does the add-on's support page help in identifying its files?