Thank you for your help with this.  Sorry to take so long to reply, but I have very little time to work on this and, as I explain below, it hasn't gone well.

Apparently you are correct about contacts: I got them once I signed in online.  I didn't even know my contacts were sitting in the cloud somewhere!  I haven't had a chance to see if they are as I had last left them.

The messages are another matter.  I copied the store folder to its proper location before installing the newly downloaded Windows Live Mail 2012.  The installer did not, however, pick up on the store and show my messages.  It did get all my accounts, though, except for their passwords (probably a good thing for security reasons).  The program immediately asked for those passwords and started downloading e-mails once I provided them for each account.  Having been offline for 6 weeks, I got well over 1000 e-mails.

But what about all the old e-mails?  I decided to try to import them.  Looked straightforward enough: I chose "Import", "Messages", and "Windows Live Mail".  Unfortunately, the program did not give me a chance to select the message store, but instead immediately started importing and, as far as I can tell, searched all over both drives (I still had the external hard drive on which I had backed up everything prior to doing the PC Refresh attached via USB), importing everything it found!

The problem is that the imports were in pieces.  That is, of the four or five imported folders, each with the date of the import and some additional numbers, none contained all my old e-mails.  Some contained only the first level of my e-mail folders, some with no messages and some with messages.  Others had messages in only the sub-folders.  It took a long time, but I was eventually able to move folders and messages around and recreate my old folder structure.

But now I have discovered another problem.  In some of the sub-sub-folders all the messages bring up only the first message.  That is to say, even though the message pane shows all the messages which should be there with all the correct data on them (from, to, subject, size, etc.), no matter which message I click, only the content of the first message shows!  This is true for both the preview pane and when double-clicking to get a separate message window.

Do you have a fix for this problem?  As I said, all indications are that the messages are there, but for some reason they don't come up when I try to view them: I just keep getting the content of only one of the messages over and over again.

This problem does not exist in all the folders, but it does exist in a great many of them.

Would appreciate any help you can give me, again.

Thank you for your assistance.

                                  Sincerely,

                                  Robert Randall