I don't want to insult your intelligence, but let's start with the fairly obvious items: Once you select 'Address Book', do you have a pane on the left with 'Personal Address Book', 'Collected Addresses', and maybe some others? If not, click on 'View', 'Layout', and check 'Directory Pane'. Look in each of those to see if your entries are there. If not, come back for more help.

No insult taken. But, unfortunately, no addresses show up when I click on either personal or collected addresses. Both contact and directory pane are on by default.

There is some possibility that you have more than one profile. Look at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb#w_how-to-find-your-profile and then look in the same directory to see if there is another ********.default file.

If so, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles to switch to the other profile and look for your address book there. If you find it, export it using LDIF format, and then switch to your primary profile and import the addresses. NOTE: whatever name you give the exported address file will become the name of the address book when you import it!

Still no joy? Look at abook.mab with notepad; it is a text file. Scan down through it to see if you have your address book entries.

Let me know what you find.

Can you offer a bit more info and clarify a few points.

re: I just reinstalled Windows 7 Pro (I had to) . this would have deleted everything on your computer. So I presume you backed up your Thunderbird profile containing email etc.

Do you really mean 'reinstalled' your OS?

You have needed to reinstall Thunderbird program. when first run it would have created a new profile. You would then either use an external backup to reinstall your old profile or if using IMAP then simply recreate the mail account as all emails are on server. Thunderbird will auto create abook.mab and history.mab files in a new Profile.

re: I managed to reinstall Thunderbird and point it to my existing profile

How did you 'point it to your exisiting profile;' - you just reinstalled Window 7 - so did you make a backup of the TB profile folder? Where is your existing profile location? eg: C:\Users\Windows user name\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\Profile name\

Did you move it? You said you made no backup - Unfortunately I don't have an exported backup or anything sensible like that.

Do you use an IMAP or POP mail account?

duggabe said

There is some possibility that you have more than one profile. Look at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb#w_how-to-find-your-profile and then look in the same directory to see if there is another ********.default file. If so, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles to switch to the other profile and look for your address book there. If you find it, export it using LDIF format, and then switch to your primary profile and import the addresses. NOTE: whatever name you give the exported address file will become the name of the address book when you import it! Still no joy? Look at abook.mab with notepad; it is a text file. Scan down through it to see if you have your address book entries. Let me know what you find.

That was the issue. I was running as a new profile when I thought I was using my original profile. I created a new profile and pointed it to my original profile directory and everything, including the address book, was as it was before.

Thank you very much for the help!