Is far as I know you can't use the migration wizard to go from vista to 8. You can use a computer with a clean install of Windows 7 and migrate from there to 8.

You can copy, if still accessable, the profile directory ( c:\users\.....) to an external harddisk/USB-device and import the email to Windows Live Mail on Windows 8 and then migrate to thunderbird.

Thanks.

More facts. Had the old Vista machine repaired. New hard drive. This one runs under Windows 7. Wrote the .MIG file to the new hard drive. Hoping that using this as intermediate will help. There is a desktop icon for Win Mail but does not seem to be an executable. No .exe file. Cannot download new copy until I get rid of old files but the Trusted whatever nonsense stops me. Trying to work around that. Won't let me sign in as Administrator. Not sure why yet. (These are days in which I really hate, hate, hate Microsoft's "We know better than you do what is good for you and don't give a rip if what we do stops you from getting work done." philosophy.)

Already tried using Live Mail. Did not work. Will be plugging away some more today.

Tbird seems to accept only imports from Outlook, not Live Mail. Not sure why Mozilla no longer accepts imports from other email clients. If it did, problem would have been solved already. BTW, Outlook won't accept the .eml's from the .MIG file, either.

Thanks again.

Download and Install Thunderbird:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/all.html

Create mail account.

Import the emails. then import the contacts.

Good info:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-thunderbird#w_switching-from-windows-mail-or-windows-live-mail-to-thunderbird
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and_exporting_your_mail

ImportExportTool

• https://freeshell.de//~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html