I have a problem with outlook express. It keeps saying that "there was an error opening this message." and "Address book may not be installed properly." when i check to see what is in the address book. I'm stumped. I cant find a .wab file anywhere on the system to try and rename ... which of course microsoft says is the easiest solution... i tried copying a wab32.dll file from another computer running win95 and still no change. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling OE several times.. i'm using OE 5. I'm all out of ideas can anyone please help me?? I would be greatly appreciative.

Address Book Failed to Load http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q191/9/46.asp

Just a minor detail...because you came up with WAB32.dll makes me wonder if you didn't search correctly. The address book is a WAB file - but that is the extension. Not the filename itself as in the case of the DLL above. Click Start, point to Find. For Drive C:\ In NAMED, type: *.WAB See if you can locate it that way. Also you should have a backup, search for: *.WA~ The location should be: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book sekirt

i double checked to verify if i even had a .wab file extension on this computer and it did not. I did a find for *.wab and no files actually even came up.. is this normal? i know i'm running win95 on this computer but i thought that it should atleast have a wab file for outlook express to work correctly. I'm exhausted of ideas and i'm just looking to try and find out if anyone has any other ideas.

i doubled checked that microsoft knowledge base article and those suggestions did not help very much at all. It says something about the registry and that it may be something wrong in there.. i'm gonna try and check out some of the other suggestions as well. Please send help if you can :D Thank you

Sounds like it got erased? What happens if you click Start. Click Run. Type WAB and click OK? Normal, I believe, is to get the address book window opened on your screen. sekirt

http://www.slipstick.com/problems/scanpst.htm How to repair pst files in WAB . --------------------------- http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/files/wab.htm#wabfile The Windows Address Book (WAB) How OE stores your Contacts The Standalone WAB and Multiple WABs Multiple WABs Network Issues with WAB Sharing the Contacts folder in Outlook WindowsXP Users On WindowsXP, OE user files, including *.wab and *.dbx files, are by default marked as hidden. To view these files in Explorer, you must enable Show Hidden Files and Folders under Start | Control Panel | Folder Options | View. ----- http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx OE5 has a proprietary binary format that makes archiving individual messages difficult. In addition, a number of people have indicated that their message folders have become corrupted and OE can not read them. Consequently, they have lost all the messages in that folder. DBXtract.exe extracts all mail and news messages from individual dbx files. After extracting the messages one can drag them from a Windows Explorer folder into an Outlook Express mail folder. PS. if you have a lot , make sure you nominate/create a folder , or you will have them all over & off your desktop . - DBX files damaged . http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,798807,00.html If an Outlook Express database (dbx) file is broken, there does not seem to be any way to repair it without losing its contents. The best option is therefore to save any recent mail, by dragging it from Outlook Express to a folder in Windows Explorer, and then replace the broken Inbox.dbx file with your back-up copy. (If the back-up is from CD, be sure to right-click the file and change it from Read-Only first.) You can restore the most recent email by dragging it from its folder in Windows Explorer and dropping it into Outlook Express, when it is open at Inbox. Alternatively you can close Outlook Express and rename Inbox.dbx to something else, such as Oldinbox.dbx. When you restart Outlook Express offline, it will notice Inbox.dbx is missing and automatically create a new one. You can then put your back-up inbox.dbx file in a temporary directory and import it. Do this by going to File|Import| Messages, selecting the correct program, then clicking the lower radio button to import mail from a store folder. The unofficial OE FAQ at www.tomsterdam.com/insideOE offers help with this and other OE problems. Also see the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q270670, How to Back Up and Recover Outlook Express Data. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=270670 You can find this by searching Google for Q270670. However, if you do not have a recent backup, you should download Stephen Cochran's free program, DBXtract, from > http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx This will extract all the mail from any dbx file and save each message as a separate plain text file. These files are named from the Subject line and have an eml extension, so, again, you can put them back in your mailbox by dragging them from Windows Explorer and dropping them in Outlook Express. An even better solution would be to import them into a proper database. This does that . StoMail from > http://home.sprintmail.com/~1854316/