Huh? Did the update loose your previous profile with mail in it. If so you need to do this, not change versions.

In the beginning there was a computer running Win8.. old and slow. A new wonderful computer showed up on my door step. But lo - winmail had expired. then I found thunderbird. It seems wonderful. I can get by without the old emails, but would really like a couple dozen of the hundreds of contacts. Was poking around in the help section and found a fellow with a similar situation and he was told he needed to go retro and get his stuff and then update. Don't want to loose recent stuff to pull this off. Thanks for any help

well I can certainly understand the shinny new, as I am in need there myself.

So My initial idea on what was happening was wrong, but I still don't follow the why. Can you give a link to this advice. I never used winmail, I had window live mail, but my understanding was the animal for Windows 8 was a different thing to the "Live" variant.

Did the winmail version you used use windows contacts? Windowskey+R and type contacts on your old device. Are the contacts you want displayed? If so, migrate that to the new version of windows and just use windows contact in Thunderbird following these instructions. https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/2013/12/windows-contacts.html

Right before lunch, my plate got really full. I'll play with this another day and post what didn't work.