Re: Outlook Express

Wasn't it David Harper who wrote:
georgema@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Folks:

A friend is having problems with the above. When he goes to open a message
he gets the following:
The address book failed to load. Outlook express is incorrectly configured.

He has downloaded the latest version of IE which we thought would have
downloaded the latest version of Outlook Express and would have corrected
the problem. But, it did not.

On my Windows XP machine, Outlook Express looks for the address book in
this folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\<USER>\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book

where <USER> is the Windows user name.

The file is called <USER>.wab although the file manager will show it
simply as <USER> and tell you that it is an address book file.
Double-clicking it should start the same address book application that
Outlook Express uses to manage the address book.

If the address book application can't load the file successfully, this
may indicate that the file is corrupted.

If your friend is lucky, he makes regular backups and he can restore the
corrupted file from his backup. He *does* make backups, right? :-)


Aha. That information allowed me to solve the same situation on my
computer.

At some point in the past, I use some LapLink software to copy data from
my old Windows 98 machine to my new Windows XP, and in the process OE
stopped working on the new machine, throwing "Outlook express is
incorrectly configured" errors. Uninstalling and reinstalling OE didn't
fix it. I didn't want to do a system restore because it took about 14
hours to pump everything across and I didn't want to risk losing all
that just for OE (which I hardly ever use anyway[1]).

It turns out that the file had ended up being called "Default.wab"
instead of "Mike.wab", because my W98 machine doesn't have USERs in the
same sense that XP does. Renaming the file fixes the problem.

[1] The only time I do like to use MSOE is for posting binary images to
usenet newsgroups. My preferred news client produces posts which are RFC
standards compliant, and people using MSOE can't see my images because
MSOE doesn't support the relevant RFCs correctly.

--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
.

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