A few days ago, as I was rebooting my PC, it first got into a lengthy check apparently to check my hard drive. When it completed the test it opened Windows XP as usual and all my Office applications worked fine except Outlook XP. When I tried to open it I got the following message:

"Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Unable to display the selected folder or item. The file \\\\Outlook3.pst is not a personal folders file"

I have four outlook.pst files in the Outlook folder; two of them are above 1.9 Gbytes. Outlook3.pst, the one mentioned in the message, is 0 Kbyte.

I have tried several things so far without success:
- I imported the back up I had done
- I tried to do a system restore but it says that it could not be completed because there was no change
- I scaned the files with scanpst.exe
- I used the repair pst file tool.

None of these worked. Anybody has an idea of what I could do to fix this problem and not loose the messages and data that are in these pst files.

The size of your pst files is a real problem. Once they get above 1.8 Gig, they tend to not function properly.

First of all, remove the reference to all data files but your Mail Delivery One. RENAME the one to which Mail is Delivered. Then, create a new pst file, set mail delivery to that file, and then open the other files and start moving data...organizing by year, project, etc. whatever makes sense to you.

As for your outlook3.pst that is 0 KB, even an empty pst file is at least 16KB. Do you have a backup of that file that you can restore?

Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!

Thank you for what seems to be good the advice. Could you give me some additional info on the procedure you suggest. See below my questions.

"First of all, remove the reference to all data files but your Mail Delivery One."

What do you mean by "remove the reference"? How do I know the Mail Delivery one?

"set mail delivery to that file, and then open the other files and start moving data...organizing by year, project, etc. whatever makes sense to you."

How do I set mail delivery to a new file if I cannot open Outlook?

"As for your outlook3.pst that is 0 KB, even an empty pst file is at least 16KB. Do you have a backup of that file that you can restore?"

The backup shows the same 0Kb file and I had already moved the entire back up folder content to the active folder.

I was able to get my Outlook to open again, but I lost some eight months of email. I suppose the latest .pst file (outlook3.pst) got corrupted and showed as 0Kbyte.

I did as Jennifere suggested; moved all pst files out of the Outlook folder, and created a new file. After that I was able to open Outlook. I then imported the other pst files back into Outlook. The only one that could not work was the Outlook3.

The only thing that was surprising was that each file showed as different Personal Folders, while it was not the case before, if I remember correctly.

I hope this could help others, because I have not seen that solution on any site including Microst.

Thanks Jennifer for pointing the way.