I re-installed thunderbird and ran the thunderbird.exe -p application to point it at the profile.

Please provide more details about what you did, including full path to your profile and profile folder names.

Also please post the contents of your profiles.ini file.

Hi chris1 Thanks for responding Black screen problem with W10, Reset the system, re-installed thunderbird, ran the -p app to let thunderbird locate the profile, started thunderbird, no profile loaded, just the option to establish a new email account.

profile.ini [General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/w4tzc12n.default

The profile is in c:/thunderbird/

I have established an email account, which allows me to now set the profile path from the tools.account settings menu - However, I am getting a long list of folders that are not the ones I expected - json etc.

Thanks for your help Peter

"The profile is in c:/thunderbird/"

That is probably where you go wrong. Thunderbird looks for profiles.ini in %APPDATA%, or specifically,

C:\Users\<your user account>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird

I don't understand what has happened. If you have indeed used the -p command line switch, it should have built a new profiles.ini in the correct location, pointing to the abnormal c:\thunderbird location.

The profiles.ini you have shown us doesn't refer to this location, so it either isn't the right profiles.ini or the set-up procedure hasn't been correctly followed through.