Migrating to new macbook air with Lion, entourage 2008 doesn't work

Question

I  bought a new macbook air with lion installed. trying to migrate data from my old macbook with snow leopard. Got most data across, and installed my most frequently used applications:
- office 2008: most office apps 2008 work, if buggily. entourage not, see below.
- firefox (hangs up when downloading updates)
- dropbox (ditto)
<these two problems may have something to do with internet proxy settings, will try to sort that out later>
MAIN ISSUE:
entourage wont open at all.  so for now i'm using my old comp for e-mail and the new for the rest.
MY OPTIONS:
please advise (1) what you think is the most time & nerve-saving option (2) how to do it smoothly:
A) try to get office 2008 to work.
when trying to open entourage, it tells me this version (office 2008 12.0) cannot open this entourage database (12.3)
error for other apps says there is a problem with database, and rebuilding several times did not fix it.
would have to start with updating to the version i used last (office 2008 12.3). Problem is the ms office updater does not seem to work on lion. the first update does not open, says it does not support powermac.
B) buying office 2011, and migrating entourage 2008 to outlook.
I suppose the best way to do this is to install office 2011 on the old mac first, then on the new one, then move database, right?
C) migrating from entourage 2008 to lion mail.
best way to do this would be to import entourage email to leopard mail, then move those files to the new mac?  and move entourage addresses into the mac addressbook. my major concern is that i have a lot of mailing rules, and a fair bunch of notes. a lot. i;d rather not have to recreate those by hand. Is there a way to import rules from entourage to mail?
i also habe a huge backstock of mail, over 10,000, and a correspondigly huge addressbook (within entourage). i'm ready to abandon entourage at last (though i used it for a decade), but i want to have my addresses, my rules, and at least the last 3 yrs of emails. i get about 130 mails a day so i need plenty of automatic organizing capability.
i never had issues  my old mac/snow leopard, i just ran out of ram and the one usb broke, so i figured it's time. kinda sorry i did not just get the usb repaired and extra ram. what a hassle these migrations always are.
cheers!
maedi

Answer 1

Kappy wrote:
Yes, repairing first is a sound idea. In my experience I've only moved from Entourage to the OS X applications or from one version of Entourage to another. In the latter I've been able to just copy over the Microsoft User Data folder. But I have not used Entourage for quite some time.
Microsoft don't make it quite that easy to migrate to their own applications, but the import from a 'tidy' .rge file works well, I had a lot of issues with the first few I migrated but after performing a database repair prior to import all proceeded smoothly.