Augh! Half the contacts in my Address Book disappeared!

Dear Folks,
I just upgraded my laptop from OS 10.4.11 to 10.6.3. I launched Address Book this morning and fully HALF of the contact information has disappeared. That's something like 300 address "cards" just vanished.
What happened?!?! If I can't recover these from within Snow Leopard, which would be best, can you folks tell me the names and paths for the files that Address Book uses to store the 'cards?' I have my pre-Snow Leopard backup and I can go to it to retrieve those files.
Worst case scenario is that I have to reboot into Tiger from an external drive, pull in those old contact files, and manually re-enter that information into Snow Leopard's address book. Hopefully, there's a better way. But regardless, I need to get that contact info back.
HELP!
pax / Ctein

Dear Macnewbie and Barney,
Thank you very much! Wiping out everything in the AddressBook folder except for addressBook.data did the trick. The app regenerated my complete contact list-- didn't even have to resort to my backups.
BTW, Barney, Macnoob got the 'solved' credit because I didn't realize I could credit only one of you and I checked off his message first. It was my intent to give both of your credits-- apparently, not allowed.
As an aside, here's a nice little trick when you want to preserve files while preventing an app from accessing them. Compress them with the Finder. That converts them to a zip file that the app can't use, and you can delete the originals without irreversibly losing the data.
It's a trick I started using on PC's, where there can be "path" instructions that let applications access data file in all sort of places you'd not expect. After chasing my tail on a few projects where I thought I'd copied data to an inaccessible location and hadn't, I started doing this.
Anyway, thanks again.
pax / Ctein

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Augh! Half the contacts in my Address Book disappeared!

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