I just spent nearly an hour trying to recover from a partially trashed profile directory. This is not the first time this has happened. What happens is this: something happens to the file "registry" -- perhaps it gets removed, or corrupted, or edited. The rest of the profile directory is fine. I want my profile name to be "akkana", and my profile directory to be ~/.mozilla/akkana (the original default). But the current profile directory doesn't give me the option of using an existing profile (the perfectly good "akkana" directory that's already there) -- it tells me it will, but then it creates an akkana-2 or akkana-3 directory there, which is not what I want. It also, if registry has been removed, cannot recognize any of the existing profiles there as being valid profiles, so they don't show up in the profile manager's menu and the only option it gives me is "Create a new profile." Perhaps what I'm really asking for here is a way to "regenerate the magic unreadable registry file".

Bhuvan, this is probably Linux-specific because the registry lives inside the user directory. Tentatively marking M16 assuming there's no simple workaround.

registry (which contains profile information) on linux lives in ~/.mozilla folder. All other mozilla profile directories, by default, also live in the same place ~/.mozilla (siblings to registry). All we need here is the ability to use the existing profile directory. This gug is a dup of bug 17457. Another thing to note is that, if we delete our mozregistry (registry in case of Linux), we lose all our profile information. After that, it does not matter whether you have the profile directories or not. As per the app, the profile information is lost and it will bring up Create Profile Wizard. However fixing bug 17457 shoud allow the user to use the exisiting profile directory. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 17457 ***

ok