What happens when you are working on your computer and out of the blue your Outlook Express email program starts acting funny? You expect the worst - that you are going to have to delete your email account and set it up all over again, loosing all of your critical emails from important clients. Hold on just a second though, there are some techniques that can help you to get back on your feet in no time!

First of all, as with any problem with a computer application, you should just try a nice and simple restart of your windows operating system. Many people are skeptical of this “reboot” technique, but what you don’t realize is that improperly closed files, memory corruption and damage to system files can often be corrected by doing this simple step. Of course, if this does not resolve your issue, you are going to have to work a little harder to get going again.

Before you start, close all the open programs that you have running on your computer other than Outlook Express and Internet Explorer. Now that you have done that, you will want to navigate to Tools and then Internet Options in your Internet Explorer Browser. After selecting the Temporary Internet Files panel, select Delete Files and follow the prompts to clear all the Temporary Internet Files on your computer. Be sure that when going through these steps that you select the check box to delete all offline files.

What the heck? Why are you deleting files in Internet Explorer if you are having problems with your Outlook Express program! Well, each time a message is displayed in Outlook Express, the application will create a temporary file to help it display the message’s contents. This file is saved in the Temporary Internet Files folder on your system and corrupt temporary files for Outlook may be causing your problem!

If you are still having troubles with your Outlook Express application, you may wish to try compacting all the Outlook Express folders. To do this you will want to select File and then Work Offline. This is to prevent any new messages arriving while your computer is compacting your old messages. Then you are going to want to select File and then Folder. Finally select Compact all folders and do not use your computer until the process has finished. If an error occurs at this point you will want to reboot your computer and then try the process again. The reason this may resolve your issues is that Outlook Express stores a message index in a file called Folders.dbx. If there are problems with this file, Outlook Express is not going work properly. When Outlook Express compacts the folders, it also updates this file, causing any errors to be corrected with the new values.

If you are still having issues, the next thing that you will want to attempt is to reregister Outlook Express. This will cause Outlook Express to rewrite its registry keys on your Windows registry and this will correct issues related to incorrect registry values for Outlook Express. To accomplish this, you will need to navigate to Start and then Run on your desktop. Type in msimn / reg and then select the OK button. In the Internet Explorer window that pops up on your screen, select the Tools menu and then Options. Now you will need to select the Programs tab and select Outlook Express as the default email client.

There are also DLL files that may be causing issues in your Outlook Express program. You can reregister them, or correct any errors in them by navigating to Start and then selecting Run. Type in regsvr32 urlmon.dll and then click on the OK button. You will need to repeat these steps and also run the following commands: regsvr32 mshtml.dll, regsvr32 shdocvw.dll, regsvr32 browseui.dll and regsvr32 msjava.dll.

If you have attempted the solutions above and are still having problems with your Outlook Express program, then you really only have three options remaining. You can export your messages from the current email account and then create a new Identity and import the messages into it. This is of course if your Outlook Express application is running well enough to accomplish this without errors. You may also need to reinstall or repair your Outlook Express Application. However this may cause you to lose all of your messages or contacts. Finally, you can try a third party Outlook Express repair program found on the Internet.