Ah-hah - copied current small pst file to elsewhere, overwrote it at its old location with the large one I had just before starting this thread, and outlook opened with all my old messages - and I have a spare of the intervening messages between then and now.

Deleted the last few messages before the crash, and after some thought outlook obliged, and I have since picked up messages successfully.

I am going to need to relocate the default location for outlook.pst and archive.pst off the C drive onto the F, and figure out how to slim down the now working outlook.pst so that I can readily retrieve arcived files without doing all this fiddling any time I need to use arcived messages.

I also need to reset "rules" so that messages from freecycle go straight to the freecycle folder for later browsing.

We are gaining.

SRS, did you get into your old hard drive? I once blew one up so thoroughly with a PSU failure that it did absolutely nothing and was wholly inaccessible. That PSU failure also took the motherboard, and processor, but left, for some reason, all the riser cards and optical drives and the floppy!

I stll can't find the option in outlook to address a different pst file. I know it's there because I've used it before but the last couple of days it is eluding me! If I could find it then I could as you suggest make a directory with carefully named psts lined up in rows, and prety much flick between them as necessary.