Windows Live Essentials update - all contacts disappeared

10_66

I use Windows Live Mail and I was sending an email today and tried to go to my contacts, only to find that there were no contacts showing. Also, when I clicked on the contacts button at the bottom left of the screen, although "contacts" was listed, it wasn't registering the click (ie, it remained on the "mail" selection), which concerned me because that meant that I couldn't export my backup of contacts to the contacts folder.

I then remembered that I'd had a prompt a couple of weeks' ago that there was a Windows Live Essentials update available, which I'd accepted. So I went to system restore and selected the date before this update, and thankfully, my contacts re-appeared. Does anyone know why the update removed my contacts, and also stopped access to the contacts folder? Also, it would appear that I can't accept any updates to Windows Live now if I don't want to lose my contacts again, so is this going to be detrimental to using Windows Live?

Tallymanjohn

Just as an experiment, your contacts should be stored in a folder located in User/Appdata/Local/Microsoft. Try making a copy of the contents, set a system restore point, do the update and see if the contents of the folder, or the folder itself are still there - if they have gone then copy the contents back & see if that restores them.