Could you be more specific about your email problem - possibly with this info someone here may be able to help you resolve the issue w/o a full system reinstall.

smdevon,

You can reinstall Outlook Express (and not all of XP) using the procedure here.

I'm afraid my Outlook Express is a mess, and I've probably corrupted something somewhere,  and it's kind of a long story. 

A Dell rep walked me through a Reinstall of OUtlook Express using the WinXP disk (SP 1a).  Basically, we went to the C:\WINDOWS\INF\MSOE50.INF and clicked "Install".  After that I keep getting these messages:

When I first open OE, I get this message:

      "Address book failed to load.  Outlook Express is incorrectly configured, please re-install."

If I attempt to create, open or reply to a message, I get the following message.

      "There was an error opening this message. An error has occurred. "

HOWEVER, prior to talking with the dell rep, a previous dell rep gave me these instructions to follow: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;278909&Product=oex , which is titled  "How to Manually Uninstall and Reinstall Outlook Express on Windows Millennium".  which incidentally I have a Dimension 4600. I'm not sure if this created another problem, but it still didn't work.   I attempted to get through the instructions and wasn't able to save all of my registers evidently. Because when I reinstalled OE,  I was missing two registers for some reason, and I couldn't reload them -- from a backup -- so I still do not have them:  

HKEY_LOCAL-MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\OUTLOOKEXPRESS and the WAB register in the same subkey branch.  

Honestly,  I hardly know what I'm doing when playing around with the registers. 

One strange thing happened, part 4 of the document (noted above) instructed me to delete the OE files, after I deleted the files in the c:\program files\OE folder, they 'reappeared like magic'   .  I must have deleted the files 4 times, and each time they came back!  I even had four copies of it in my recycle bin!     Spooky.

Message Edited by smdevon on 09-28-2004 11:20 PM