I have to have Outlook in order to be able to read my .pst file(s), and I have to be able to read my .pst files because they contain all my old POP3 email.

I have tried Thunderbird in the past and installed Mozilla for other people - but they do not integrate with rest of the Office suite so well.

If I could live with no access to old emails I might be able to use a different POP3 system, but I can't. As far as I know (maybe I am wrong, in which case I would love to know) there is nothing else that will let me get at and read old .pst files.

While stuff is on the server at either relevant ISP, F2S or Btinternet, I can read it in the inbox there - but to date Outlook has been set to delete messages off the server when taking them down to ist own inbox.

I run 98SE (as I specified) so restore is not available - althought here used to be, and again if anyone can tell me what happened to it I would be grateful, a utility that did enable you to do restores and rollbacks on 98SE and other non-restore Windoze OSs. But haven't got it so I can't do that.

Yes, also as stated, so far it is only Outlook that is being a problem. Actually that's not quite true, defrag stopped running a while back and alleges there is not enough memory. I have several partitions spread over two drives as follows: -

Partition   Size(gig)    Free space    Comment
C          5.41g         2.31g       Operating system
D          149g          143g         General Data
E          5.39g         4.29g       Ghost file
F          25.1g         19.5g       Specific Data
G          25.1g         14.8g       Specific (backups)         


I will give it a go to reinstate Office to its original state (rather than try to "repair" which as I said will not run and crashes the system) and then I could try uninstallng the whole of Office and reinstalling all its bits - I will report back on that.

I could try the usual housecleaning, but I was reasonably up to date with it. More later.