Have you tried removing and re-installing Lightning? (The calendar add-on, not Thunderbird itself.)

I have not tried that but I will. I believe the problem is that I used mozbackup to bring the settings from another of my computers that was setup and working fine, to my primary one that has been malfunctioning. The other computer did not have calendar events, but I have a complete copy of disk that I can bring the file over that stores the events if I know its name. My primary computer's T'bird has file folders messed up on the left payne interface. I was trying to bring the correct file folder hiearchy over from the other one---it did not work and now no calendar events.

The folder hierarchy is explained here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird In my installation, the contents of the 'calendar-data' folder are three databases: cache.sqlite, deleted.sqlite and local.sqlite. I hope that helps.