Outlook Express won't "fire up"

[Jeff H]

Guys,

Long story short we had a power outage this morning and my wife was in her Outlook Express account at the time (we have four accounts set up in XP Pro SP2, the other three acccounts were not affected).

Since the outage when you click on the OE icon or the executable OE goes directly to wanting to send an error report to MS, and no way will it actually go into OE.

Where do I begin trying to fix this? I've Googled this and the links point to fixing the OE folders and databases. I think this is more basic - OE simply won't start. FWIW the other three OE accounts work just fine.

TIA,

Jeff

 

[scottws]

Was OE open on this account when it happened? There could be some sort of corruption in the profile. I would take the advice given and fix the folders and databases and go from there.

If it works on the other accounts it obviously isn't a problem with the application itself, but rather something with the profile on the one account.

 

[Jeff H]

scottws, yes, OE was open when the power either spiked or went out (I wasn't home at the time). I'm going to guess that it can't hurt to do a folders/database fix. I did try a System Restore to yesterday's date, and that didn't "fix" it.

Jeff

 

[rasczak]

not sure about OE but try this anyway, scanpst.exe, this tool helps fix corrupted .pst files.

 

[Doh!]

Outlook Express doesn't use .pst files. It uses .dbx.

 

[imported_Phil]

Create a new account profile within OE, and import the mail from an "OE store directory" (that's what it's listed as when performing an Import in OE). You may want to do this from another Windows profile, then wipe the original mail folders (*.dbx files), go back into the problem account and re-import.

 

[Jeff H]

Phil,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure I follow the instructions about creating the OE profile in another Windows profile but I'll give it a go.

This thing gets weirder. Last night I did an sfc /scannow to see if there were any damaged/corrupted/bad system files. I had to hit the Retry key a number of times, but it finally finished. Upon reboot my system went into a restart loop midway through the XP splash screen. I was able to "recover" this morning w/ an F8 and "last know good configuration." I haven't tried the offending OE profile yet.

Jeff

 

[rasczak]

Originally posted by: Doh!
Outlook Express doesn't use .pst files. It uses .dbx.

thanks for the clarification. is there a tool similar to scanpst for OE?

 

[Jeff H]

Well guys, here's what I ended up doing. I set up a new user profile in XP, and set up within the profile a new email profile, using the same address. I then imported over the dbx files, and OE continued to work. I then imported over the wab address book and whamo, no OE.

So, I went back to a recent DVD-RW backup of the wab file and the profile is now working. I then deleted the "offending" profile.

I have to say this about XP - that darn thing is robust. Last night I did an SFC /SCANNOW and the result, as I said in an earlier post, was that it put my system in a reboot loop. This morning I restored to "Last know good configuration" and all is well.

Jeff