Kendall

I've been using OE for more than ten years, and have never seen any kind of OE popup or message that wasn't easy to kill. In rare occasions, if your connection to your service doesn't finish a transmission, the entire machine may lock up because you have a program open that's "waiting for a reply" or "waiting for an input," but that locks up everything.

There has been a form of malware phishing that's been very widespread recently, frequently appearing disguised as a "message failure" email. When you click to see what the problem was, you get redirected to a malicious site that installs sypware. If you've run into something of this sort, it doesn't make any difference how (what program and/or protocol you use) you receive your email, since the spyware can be loaded regardless of how you receive your mail. The phony email tells your computer that the "click" is a permission to install a program, regardless of what it tells you in the message. Your computer has to assume that you told it to do this, so your AV and Antispyware programs have to let you do it.

Unless you're really sure this message is coming from OE:

You should be able to close the program using Task Manager if OE doesn't close normally, and/or if the message doesn't disappear when OE is closed.

You can take a look at the programs, and separately at the processes, that are running in Task Manager. If OE is the only thing running, you should be able to select it and "end process" to get it turned off, if that's necessary. If there's a separate "process" running that's producing the message, you most likely have been infected by malware; although if you're not familiar with what usually is running it may be hard to spot.

Close OE and reboot.

Update definitions and run a full system scan with your Antivirus.

Update definitions and run AdAware.

Update definitions and run Spybot.

AdAware OR Spybot should find and remove the most common "undeletable messages" if this is your problem. If you've chosen some other malware scan program, most others should also be able to remove the common scams of this kind.

What you seem to be describing is NOT a normal OE behaviour, and most likely is not even coming from OE - although it may be coming through OE, using it for its display interface.

I've had one other query from a friend who described somewhat similar symptoms, and in particular a "message" that refused to be closed. Friend is a good solid medical practicioner, a certified Shaman, does great beadwork and has written a couple of books; but he nows absolutely squat-from-scat about computers so his descriptions were similarly vague. The AdAware and Spybot scans did clear the problem for him, about 2 months ago.

John