Dear Ms. Poremsky,
Thank you so much for your timely and comprehensive reply.
FYI, I got through to the MS Help Desk (their consumer support arm) and spoke with a really knowledgeable tech about this issue. I can say with confidence that the tech who resolved this issue has seen this problem before. It appears that the problem occurs in one of two ways: (1) either during the initial configuration of a POP email account (I don’t know whether this also happens when configuring MAPI or not) something occurs that keeps the account from being properly configured within Outlook or (2) something occurs during the import of the data from WLM that prevents the contact list from being seen by the address book.
One thing MS did say will cause this problem is if contacts are imported that do not have an email address populated in the WLM database address field.
MS suggests that when initializing Outlook that one choose the option of initializing it without email and then after that reopening Outlook and adding the email info to the account.
The fix in my case was (1) to create a new user profile from within Control Panel, (2) set the new profile as the default profile, (3) open Outlook and initializing w/o email support, (4) adding the email info and then (5) doing the import of contacts and email messages from WLM. For the contacts import I made sure that the import function knew to map the existing WLM email address to the Outlook Contacts email address field. This process solved the problem nicely.
As an aside, one would think that by now MS would have enough experience w. Outlook that (1) they would have written a routine that precluded this kind of behavior or (2) at least would have a KB about it. But I suppose the ever-increasing complexity of Windows and Office precludes their ability to do the first and the press of time and other priorities prevent the latter.
Let say how much I appreciate your knowledge, the amount of time you have spent developing that knowledge, and your willingness to share that w. the public.
Thank you so much,
Currie Carter