>>> There is still a lot of work reinstalling apps and restoring data from the external hard drive but it's great being past this first step.
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>>Depending on what you're using, most of the decent apps don't need registry at all. From my last six reinstalls, the only lousy players are Office, SQL server and Toad (because it's written in dot net, I guess). The rest of the stuff I use (Libre Office, Gimp, Mozilla's stuff, e editor, LD dictionary and a few more) either finds the registration on disk or doesn't need one. I regularly copy everything (I mean everything, not just what M$ decides we're allowed to see) from my old profile to the new one and then start launching apps.
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>>Even Fox doesn't really need the registry, except for the settings we already know (and I've exported the .reg file for that). It's the stuff it borrowed from the rest of M$ (mostly XML related) that won't run without proper install, which is why I do get it properly reinstalled, as this is an important part of the GUI.
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>>The reinstall woes are among the main reasons why I don't bother installing Office anymore.
>
>Office 2007 reinstalled without a hitch.

That's the whole point - I had to go through reinstallation each time, have all my settings reset to default, have new normal.dot(x)... LibreOffice works without reinstallation, you just run it and it works. And it doesn't give a damn about any registry (except for the file associations, but I handle those as I need them), you just copy your old profile into the new one (as Windowses are completely incapable of finding it on your reserve copy, the whole idea of any old stuff being preserved is incompatible with the "this is a blank new system, because I am installed on it, the world begins now" mantra).

> At this point everything has been recovered from the backup drive to the newly formatted C:\ drive. The one holdout is Mozilla Thunderbird. It stores data in two files per email folder. I can see that they correspond to the email folders I had before but are stored in an inscrutable format I haven't been able to crack yet. I tend to retain only emails that are worth saving so would really like to get them back.

Create a new profile in Thunderbird, then just copy the whole old profile into it (in account settings you can see where this is) - the whole directory structure and all the files. Actually, when I was looking for the instructions for this, I found them on Thunderbird's site.

I still have emails I received into the old Netscape in 1998, the format hasn't changed. It's the auxiliary files, where statistics for spam filters, your rules etc are stored, that are being updated version to version. I still have addresses in Tbird and bookmarks in FFox that I've collected ten or more years ago. Without reinstalling, that is - after going through probably dozen installations of various versions of Windowses on the (basically) same machine, I don't think I ever had to reinstall Mozilla's stuff.

Of course, I never install the important stuff into any "C:\program files" location. That's a slate that goes blank too often for my taste. C: drive is the scrap drive. Sometimes I try some software and if its setup doesn't give me a chance to install elsewhere, it's a major fault in my book. Perhaps two or three such pieces were otherwise good enough to be allowed to stay... but then I'd probably forget about them the next time, so they are probably extinct by now.