Hello again. Problems, which is what I meant by difficulty or corruption.
From what I can see your choice of Thunderbird is my best option, if only because I never got Microsoft Outlook in my XP Pro installation. I can't remember why that is (32 bit instead of 64?). In any case I tried to install Thunderbird in the XP computer first as you suggested, and imported my OE accounts, folders, etc. What I got when I opened Thunderbird does not look like anything in OE. By that I mean (for one thing) I don't have all my messages opened in inbox which is what I have in OE when it opens. (when I open OE it has the full inbox with messages going back several years). In Thunderbird instead I have only about a dozen messages compared to OE which has several hundred stored. Further, I can't find any of those inbox stored messages anywhere else in Thunderbird either. Thinking that I should have installed the five T-bird accounts separately I uninstalled T-bird and downloaded it again and reinstalled. But when I opened T-bird there it was again the same as the first try even before I imported anything. So I'm thinking some memory had kept that import and T-bird automatically reimported that. So I tried a full uninstall of T-bird with a differnet program (Revo) which removes all traces of the progarm and tried again. Same thing! But even if I could have erased all traces and memory from the T-bird installer I still don't see how I can install T-bird one account at a time because I didn't see that option anywhere. It just installed...period, and then ask you what you want to install (messages, folders, addresses, etc) so I don't have a choice to install one account at a time on 5 different T-bird accounts from 5 different OE accounts.
I hope I'm not being too dense. Do you understand what I'm saying?