Hi,

I was trying to use my Thunderbird portable app (on a USB from Window) from my Ubuntu desktop PC and I found this thread called " Sharing Thunderbird/Firefox profiles between Linux/Windows" very useful. However, after setting up my Thunderbird installation on Ubuntu according to the instructions in the thread, I got a weird error saying ""Thunderbird cannot use the profile XXX because it is in use. To continue, close the running instance of Thunderbird or choose a different profile."

As there is no more information in the thread about it and just in case someone else comes to the same error, I would like to share the solution I gave to this, as it is very simple.

The cause of this problem is probably a non finished lock operation (google "Profile in use - MozillaZine Knowledge Base" to know more) or simply some wrong data you didn't write correctly while editing the profiles.ini file. In my case, when I was struggling to fix this I edited the profiles.ini file again and I discovered that I had left the IsRelative=1 as it was originally but had written the absolute path to the new profile. Once this was fixed (in this case I simply changed this line into IsRelative=0) everything worked smoothly!

I hope this helps.