Moving Thunderbird profile to Mepis

I had been using Mandriva and am in the process of switching to Mepis. For some reason when I move my .thunderbird file to my home directory in Mepis and start Thunderbird, it comes up as if it's the first time run and wants to create a new account. When I've done the same thing in Mandriva, Suse, FC3, and even Windows, I open to the same mail folder structure, settings, etc that I had before.

I tried removing Thunderbird with Synaptic, deleting all files and using the same /thunderbird directory I used in Mandriva. Thunderbird runs, but it doesn't look at my old Mail files even when I specifically direct it there.

Any tips?