See:

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Recovering+important+data+from+an+old+profile
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

You can use this button to go to the Firefox profile folder:

• Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox

I went to the the applicationdata\mozilla\ folder and opened places.sqlite and it was mostly garbled code cause I viewed it in wordpad and in the bookmarkbackup folder it's just 4 .json files they are all (4kb) and when opened in wordpad i dont see the bookmarks

The places.sqlite file is a binary file and not a text file, so you can't open it in a text editor and if you would make changes and save the file then the file will get corrupted beyond any repair.

If you have removed personal data when uninstalling and didn't backup your profile folder and the JSON backups in the bookmarkbackups folder then your bookmarks are lost.
Maybe an undelete utility like Recuva can restore a recent JSON backup.

• Recuva: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

I was able to use recuva and find a bookmark.json file from earlier this month that was in an " excellent state" so i recovered it to a thumb stick and went to firefox to import the json file and firefox is telling me "unable to process the backup file" i also found some other ones that I put on the thumb stick and they all said same thing in firefox.

I was able to find a places.sqlite.tmp also in recuva.

Do I have any other options at this point?

Did you check the content with a text editor?

It is possible that the content of the file is corrupted even if Recuva was able to undelete the file (the clusters may have been used to store another file).

There are methods described in this MozillaZine forum thread to extract links from from a JSON backup.

• http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1752835

It opens in text editor but it's garbled in code. I tried the method of dragging the .json file to mozilla and pasting the bookmarklet code into the url to no avail. When dragged into a mozilla window it says "there was an error parsing the json document. The document may not be well formed"

I'm not sure this will make a difference at this point, but you said "... so i recovered it to a thumb stick and went to firefox to import the json file ..."

json bookmark backup files need to be restored, not imported.

The file that shows in your screenshot is broken.
A JSON file is one long line of text and you have a file with binary data that you can't use.

You can compare that with a JSON backup in the bookmarkbackups folder that has been created recently.