georgema@nbnet.nb.ca 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? :-) David Harper Cambridge, England

Wasn't it David Harper who wrote: >georgema@nbnet.nb.ca 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