Motorola :: Android 2.2.1 / Defy Swapping Sims / Contacts Disappear

How did I delete my Contacts? Here's what happened:

1. I had a good set of contacts in the phone itself, and on the SD card.

2. Trying to determine if Wifi Calling could possibly work with no sim installed, or with a dead Tmo sim installed, I tried both ways, in that order. (In fact, though different messages appeared, neither scenario worked.Both times, my SD was in the Defy. And the dead sim had never been used in the Defy.) I had to sign into Motoblur during this exercise.

3. I put my good sim back in.I signed back into Motoblur.I noticed during the evening that incoming calls did not show the caller etc etc etc. In fact, I had no contacts, said the phone. Not even, apparently, in the phone memory.

4. I imported contacts from the SD card. A couple recent changes made to the phone memory contacts were not present.

What in the previous steps caused my phone contacts to disappear? Just loading up a dead sim? Could it have really been so dumb as to attempt to generate a new (blank) set from that sim without asking,saying 'this will replace your contacts; do you want to continue? Though that sim had been used in a Moto Spice, Android 2.1, I cannot say with certainty that I'd ever exported the Spice XT300 contacts to the sim.And now, I decide to export the contacts to the SIM for safety sake. I see only one item, My Info. I choose All Contacts (at the top) , and it sits there seemingly forever, doing nothing.The only thing I can do is back out of that. There's 'Select All' at the bottom left, but it can't be clicked if All Contacts was. If I do that instead, it just selects me.

I rebooted, and got nothing different.I only have 100 contacts.So if those 100 are in the phone memory, why won't they export? If they're not in there, then where did the Import from SD put them?