hmm, i found a directory for modest and copied the files over yet it refuses to recognise any of the accounts... will have to play some more.

so far it's going fairly well, I was worried I'd end up with some weird inconsistencies but apart from mail my n800 is behaving as expected, and the total reflash/clean seems to have made things zippier, and I've got lots of spare space. I've not had a problem with metalayercrawler, but I've ensured I've not put symlinks into the user's home dir which seemed to be one problem.

--edit--
I discovered I had the wrong ownership settings in /var/lib/gconf/apps/modest and fixed them, and also re-copied over /home/user/.modest but still no luck, it still finds an incompletely configured mailbox I put it just to appease the startup wizard.