Vista , hide/unhide and read permissions

Ive just installed thunderbird as an email client. Straightforward, as these things go.

 The local folder location is buried deep in the thunderbird settings  its a subfolder of  the profile. I went looking for it - we have a network, and then offsite backup that runs regularly , and I wanted to sort out the backup whilst I was there. 
But the 'local folders' folder isn't visible by default. I assume windows will think that it will confuse you  by showing stuff you dont need.
How to make it visible , if you cant see it ?

I went to the root of the Users' folders , right clicked on the user and looked at properties -something like this

so I unchecked 'hidden'  and set it off - and the majority of the desktop icons ( well, all the important ones ) disappeared.  OK - id got something wrong . So how do you make it reappear when you cant see it.

Much clicking  and swearing and nothing I did restored it - not even the windows things of restarting the computer, and if that didnt work, switching it on and off at the wall.
.
I think I worked it out
To make the user folder visible again, it has to be set as read-only and then unhide. Once the computer has done its stuff , the desktop icons re-appear. But you get some really strange error messages because software need to write stuff to the disk when it start and if it cant do so , it will stumble.

• OpenOffice - an unhelpful message about a run-time error
• Dropbox - a mesage about a python error
• Firefox - an error message about it not being able to write (ha ! a clue) security settings

so once the stuff is restored  you need to go through select folder removing the read-only
So far its been

• Appdata
• Documents
• Downloads
• Dropbox 

Im sure there will be others that i havent come across yet.
But sanity is restored, catastrophe averted,a s the system is up and running

Thank you , Bill Gates - NOT