My PC crashed big style yesterday.  I had to recover via the recovery disc.  When I got it back up I noticed that shortly before it crashed there was a failed windows update.  I now have everything back up and running except Windows Live Mail.  When I click on the program it says starting and the circle goes round and round.  Strangely when an email comes through (which I can see on my ipad) the mail notification sound occurs on my PC but there is no way of getting to the email because the software doesn't load up.  So it would appear that WLM is communicating with my external mail accounts but there is no means of getting past the start up screen to get to them!

I have uninstalled WLM (twice), undertaken a full clean and reinstalled it.  All to no avail, it just starts and hangs. Interestingly when you go to task manager and look at the service it is using quite a bit of memory but no CPU. Its doing nothing just hanging.

I have no particular allegiance to WLM so I have installed another freebee mail client.  However, I'm struggling to get my contacts out of WLM.

So I guess I have two questions.  How can I get WLM to get past the startup screen so that I can continue to use it or, failing that, how can I get to my contacts so that I can use them through another mail client.

Oh and just in case you were wondering I'm not connecting to hotmail or any of the other email accounts that Microsoft are disconnecting from the WLM service in January.

Any advice would be most welcome.