Thanks for all of the help and suggestions. Really appreciate it a lot!!
Well it appears the only course of action for me to take now is to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows.
Guess I am stuck with Thunderbird at this point. The alias part is important to me as my work email deals with that.
I was thinking about going to Chrome from Firefox.
Will take me some time before I can do it (time wise) but I will report back when done.