Neither of these two procedures work at all - windows 8.1pro 64bit

Neither of these two procedures work at all!

Copying Your Local Thunderbird Settings
If you're using a local copy of Thunderbird, you may wish to just copy your local Thunderbird settings right into Thunderbird Portable. Your local Thunderbird profile is usually installed in C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default.???\ or C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Thunderbird\profiles\default.???. Just copy all of those files to the Data\profile directory within Thunderbird Portable. Sometimes, certain profiles will cause the launcher to fail or hang. In that case, start from scratch and try just copying your mailstores (Mail and ImapMail directories) as well as your prefs.js and abook.mab files.