The neat thing to do would be to copy the profile from the XP machine to the W8 machine. This would have transferred your messages, your account settings and your Address Book and much else.

Given that you have set up Thunderbird and have started using it, copying over the profile may not now be terribly attractive for you.

So, instead, you can export and import your Address Books.

On the XP computer, open the Address Book, select an address book (e.g. Personal Address Book), select Tools|Export, select the name and location of a file to contain the exported data, choose LDIF and then Save. Repeat for each required address book. Give your LDIF files simple but meaningful names, such as PAB.ldif and CA.ldif. Don't use, for instance, Personal Address Book.ldif, as this will create a second address book with the same name as one of the defaults and you won't be able to easily tell which is which.

Put the exported LDIF files where the W8 computer can see them, e.g. a USB memory stick.

On the W8 machine, open the address book, Tools|Import and select an exported LDIF file. It will import and create a new address book; you'll probably want to move the Contact data back to the usual address book. You can select all (ctrl+a) then drag-and-drop the imported Contacts to the preferred address book. Repeat for each LDIF file.

Having said that, I don't understand what you mean by "my personal e-mail addresses came thru with no difficulty however my other account the contacts in address book didn't come thru"; unless you have moved the profile folder over, I don't understand why any contacts should have transferred.

If you have in fact moved the profile folder, then I'm puzzled as to why the transfer of address books has been incomplete. However the export and import route should be able to reclaim the missing address book(s).

What if you are setting up a new computer because the old one crashes and does not load Windows anymore? That's what happened to me. I was able to recover all my data onto a portable drive but can no longer run Thunderbird {or anything else} on the old computer. In this case it would be nice if the Tools->Import function would import from the previous Thunderbird installation without having an LDIF file, but no luck on that. Seems to me that since Thunderbird understands Thunderbird formats that it might be easy to include Import Thunderbird Address Book (or other data) from one installation to another.

Uh, copy your profile from the rescued data.

You can also, if you really want to do it piecemeal, copy just the *. mab files. Personal Address Book is contained in abook.mab, and Collected Addresses in history.mab. These two can be just copied; other mab files can be imported using the MoreColumnsForAddressBook add-on.

That worked like a charm. Makes a lot more sense than the export/import method and worked for me. Thank you very much.

This is not a reply, but a question. As you will see I am truly a computer dummy! I read all of these replies but it's like greek to me! My problem is I have this new laptop but my desktop is 600 miles away from where I am now & I want to import my address book. Is there a way to import it even though I don't have excess to my desktop? In laymens terms please. I use Windows 8.1 Thank you