I thought I had this problem sorted. I would simply overwrite the mozzila and thunderbird directories ( seperate folders ) with the destination machine. A few months back this had the effect of restoring all my mail folders including firefox bookmarks.

For some reason or other lately I am finding this exercise works but does something strange to my desktop. The destination machine crashes when I try to either switch user, shutdown or restart using both gui or console commands such as "init 6", poweroff, shutdown -h now...

I have a gut feeling its got to be some thing with ownership but not sure.

Can anyone tell what's going on here?

Or a cleaner way of restoring thunderbird mail folders from one machine to newly built slackware 12.2 system.

I would just follow the mozilla guidelines for backup and restore..

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

I don't see how moving just moving a mozilla profile would cause the other issues you describe though..

Your problem is certainly caused by something else. Even more because your local thunderbird directory belongs to one user only (each user has such a directory) and replacing or deleting it will affect only the current user.
Maybe you did some other clean-ups as well, maybe even as root, which is not a good idea.

Well, this is all very strange. since this thread's initial posting I have noticed this problem becoming bigger. I will give a brief description here and create a seperate thread for as it seems less to do with backups.

I am noticing that each time I restart, switch user, do "init 6"...basically anything to do with the getty program on KDE the system freezes. The symptoms are, my desktop icons become really big and mouse freezes. Only options are to do is to use the power switch. This happens in both user and root mode.

I get the same symptoms using Slackware and PCLinuxOS. Further pointing to KDE or the getty program.

Knowing my luck no-one has experienced this problem...!!!

I have switched to Debian 4.Or5 and everything seems to be fine so far which rules out hardware such as video or screen.