Thunderbird not connecting to mail servers (XP shared profile)

I've installed Thunderbird on Win 7 and edited the profile.ini to point to the profile in XP. Thunderbird starts with all my accounts and old e-mails, but I cannot retreive or send mails.

My passwords are not save so I select the account I want to use and click on "get mail". The status bar shows connected to blahblah.mail.com, but I don't get the pop-up to enter my password.

I've also tried moving the profile to a different drive, disabling my Firewall and Antivirus - still the same.

Likely a profile location problem; start here: Profile folder - Thunderbird - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Not Myself said:

Likely a profile location problem; start here: Profile folder - Thunderbird - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

If it was a profile issue, I probably wouldn't see my accounts and all the old mails. Plus the account settings are all the same as under XP. One a side note, doing the same with XP and Ubuntu (instead of Win 7) worked fine. I edited files and created new ones from within Win 7 and also copied the profile to a data drive and edited the profile.ini to point there.... same thing, all mails and setting there, but unable to send or receive, so it can't be a write permission issue.

So far I've figured out that Thunderbird works fine if I disable AVAST's mail shield.

This works, IF, using Avast! 8, you make changes from what one had to use with Avast! 7:

Avast!, Mail Shield, Settings, SSL scanning, deselect Scan SSL connections.

Thunderbird, Account Settings, Server Settings, Security Settings, Connection Security, use either StartTLS or SSL/TLS, and Authentication, probably use Normal password. The options here will depend upon your ISP.

Since I have to disable SSL scanning, I figured I might as well turn off mail scanning off.

I did read something about certificates, but couldn't be bothered to go through all the steps yet. For my mail accounts that receive SPAM, I've set Thunderbird to only download the headers first and view the mail as text only anyway.

So I'm not too concered. Just annoyed that it works fine with the latest version of AVAST under XP.