"Create a new Profile"-Issue

"Create a new Profile" - this is probably the most common advice & solution for many problems.

While it is obviously in most cases the fastest or only way to get an ailing Songbird back on its little feet and therefore such an advice is very legitimate, it is also obviously a very unsatisfying solution, because the user probably looses a lot data & customization.

There are some tools (like RatingFile or PlaylistExport), that can help to migrate at least some of the data. But still there is data you can't migrate (like settings, bookmarks, smart playlists, etc..). If you don't use "metadata writing", you even might loose your whole database.

Here some suggestions (by priority):

1.) Instead mainly curing the symptoms (create a new profile), there could be a greater effort to track down the causes, that lead to the problem in the first place. But I don't know, how this could be done...

2.) Many problems appear after updating Songbird. On installation of a new Version, Songbird updates the profile, too, so there is no "way back", I can't just install the earlier version and use my working profile there. Maybe during the update process, Songbird should offer an option to backup the profile, to keep this backdoor open. (I do this manually, but many people don't.) Also it would be nice, if we could download older Songbird-Versions from the website (or is this possible already?).

3.) It would be really nice to have a single & reliable tool, that allows to migrate as much stuff as possible from one profile to another (without migrating the problems, that might be the crux).

In all the years I'm using Firefox, I only once created a new Profile (on switch to v 3.0), and could migrate most of my data.
In Songbird, I myself haven't been able to use a single Profile for longer than one Songbird-Release and often lost more or less data. Because I know about this issue, I'm cautious with spending to much work on data, that might get lost anyway. It's sad, to not use the full ability of the bird, because of the fear of loosing data... an improvement here would really be appreciated :-)