Address Book's entries have disappeared - all except two

Hello everyone.
I'm hoping that members might be able to offer me some advice about a problem I'm having with Address Book.
I use an intel iMac running OS 10.4.11 and Address Book 4.0.6. This morning I used iSync to synchronise my Palm TX with the iMac and found that all the entries in the Palm's Contacts had disappeared (except for 2 — Apple Computers and my own entry). When I loaded Address Book I found the same situation, all the records were gone except for my own and Apple's. The last time I used Address Book, with no problems, was yesterday at about 2.00pm.
I've been wandering round the web since then finding a number of variations of my problem and I've tried the solutions suggested, with no luck. I've renamed AddressBook.data.previous as AddressBook.data and I've copied the whole Application Support folder for Address Book from my backup (I clone the iMac onto an external hard drive) to the iMac's hard drive, both without success. I still have the files ABPerson.skindexinverted (220K) and ABSubscribedPerson.skindexinverted (8K), but the data file itself is only 8K.
One of the discussions I found mentioned records in a MetaData folder for Address Book, so I went to Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook/MetaData on the iMac's disk and found 2 files, presumably the two records which are still left in Address Book. Their names begin with a long alphanumeric sequence and continue /ABPerson.abcdp. The same folder on the backup hard disk contains 535 such files. Is it possible that these are the lost records?
All help gratefully received!
Susan

Hi
Sorry about the delay in replying to your last message, but I've had a print deadline to meet, which always puts everything else on hold.
I've opened a few of the .abcdp files with Text Edit and the information is in there, buried among loads of code, so many thanks for telling me that. I've beamed the address book from my other half's Palm (which used to be mine) over to mine, so I should have most of the current contacts which I hope I can transfer onto the iMac. The missing ones, distant members of my family for instance, I will have to search for in the .abcdp files and enter manually into AB (always remembering to take a backup regularly!).
Unfortunately I don't know anyone with a Mac running Leopard, in fact I only know one other person with a Mac. We freed ourselves from the thralldom of the PC only three years ago and are still the odd ones out with colleagues and friends. Having the Macs has made using a computer enjoyable for the first time in 25 years, ever since we bought a Commodore 700 and I began the daily struggle with various pieces of user-hostile software.
Many thanks for helping me out. I've put Snow Leopard at the top of my shopping list by the way.
Regards
Susan

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