Hey there! It sounds like you're having a bit of trouble with Thunderbird installation and calendars. No worries, we're here to help! When Thunderbird stalls during installation, it might be due to various reasons, such as conflicting software or corrupted files. First, make sure to disable any antivirus or security software temporarily and try installing again. If that doesn't work, try downloading Thunderbird from the official website directly. As for the calendars, the installation process usually doesn't automatically import them. After installing Thunderbird successfully, you can go to the "Events and Tasks" tab in Thunderbird and click on "File," then "Import," and choose the calendar file format you want to import.

The automatic import from Outlook has been flawed for years, but one item that's known is that it won't work if you choose to import 'everything'. Try importing just the mail. Otherwise, try with MailStore Home as an intermediary:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1397983

Thanks - a very useful "reality check" for me. I've just tried exporting my Inbox, Sent and Calendar to separate *.PST files with a view to importing them to Tbird in stages. Does that sound like a runner? Should I have used *.csv format instead?

I would first try the TB Import function with mail only, as long as Outlook is already installed on the same computer. TB won't import pst files directly (but MailStore will). Then try importing calendars and contacts in separate steps. If that doesn't work, see if you can export calendars from Outlook in ics format, and import those to TB. If not, export to csv. For contacts, export to csv, but before importing to TB, it's often advisable to edit the csv in a spreadsheet to make the structure more closely resemble the TB format (which can be seen by exporting a test address book from TB to csv). Otherwise, it can be challenging to match the Outlook fields to the TB ones during import.