It seems the personal address book and the contacts folder are quite different things: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/books/homeandofficeuser/tips/050102.asp says "You might decide to add a personal address book (PAB) to store addresses outside your Contacts folder. For example, you might use the PAB to store personal addresses separately from work addresses."
Somewhat half way down that same page is an instruction on how to import the Outlook Express address book into the personal address book in Outlook. It's a File>Import, but the location of the Outlook address book matters a lot.
Read through http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;196492 or http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=290827 for information backup, restore and move Outlook data. Do it regularly or backup the whole pst-file as part of your regular grand-scale backup.
Hope this helps.
Kees
I upgraded from Office 97 to Office 2003 when I replaced my hard drive a while back. In the process of trying to import my address book from Outlook exspress into Outlook I messed things up somehow, don't even remember how I did what I did but here is the situation. When I open a new message and click on "to" the "select names" dialog box opens and in the "show names from" drop down list the only selection is "personal address book" and it is empty. However, on the left side of Outlook I can click on "Contacts" and all my contacts are there and I can send e-mails to them by right clicking on the contact and selecting "new message to contact". However, this only lets me send e-mails to one contact at a time.
Is there anyway I can get the contacts back in my "show names from" drop down list? Would I have to reinstall Outlook? If so will it keep all my current contacts, or can I back them up and import them again? Or is there some even simpler way to correct the problem.

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