Migrating Thunderbird profiles: A story in three acts (fgiesen.wordpress.com)

That’s a real blast from the past. Good debugging skills to track down the real source of the problem, given the lack of error reporting.

(2011)

This is all over the place. I've done this countless times when reinstalling laptops etc (because it saves redownloading 4GB worth of mailbox) and you just install thunderbird on the new machine, run it once, close it, make sure it closes properly then copy the Thunderbird directory from your appdata. Then you re-open it and it works.