I hate Mozilla sometimes. Something screwed up my profile to the point that the preferences windows wasn’t populated with data. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just make a new profile and get a fresh start.” Went well until I tried to migrate/import my passwords to the new profile. Long story short, here’s what you need to do:

Make a new profile and go to a page that will let you save a password in the Password Manager.

Find the < random number >.s file from your previous profile and copy it to your new one.

Close Mozilla and edit prefs.js and find the “signon.SignonFileName” entry. Change the < random number >.s to be the file you just copied.

Start Mozilla and you should have all your passwords recovered. If you don’t, chances are good you either didn’t do it right, or, like me, you had the extra encryption enabled. That’s the “Use Encryption when storing sensitive data” option under Passwords in the Preferences. If so, you’ll need to copy the key3.db and cert8.db files over from your old profile as well.

There’s a very good chance you don’t need both of those .db files, but I simply don’t care. I killed a good hour jerking around with this POS and I don’t care to look it up any further.