Well, I had no trouble generating contours. All I did was unfreeze the 0 layer, then turn on contours in the display style. The surface was already built. I reattached the drawing here.
And your data file looks like it was exported as some sort of international format. Every other byte is a null, which confuses most things. I'm attaching an image of what it looks like in a Hex editor (since I can't seem to copy and paste the Hex output into the web browser).
OK, the surface question must have been sheer exhaustion.
The other question, well I haven't gotten the same error with that data today. (yet)
The exported TXT was just a straight-up MAP query to a report file. Producing what appears to be a coordinate file, until one attempt to import said data as points. Interoperability Check Please!
ERROR: Could not instantiate AecDict!
Waitress "I think there's a pill for that"