I have seen a few posts around here about people getting a strange icon appearing on their desktop with a tilde sign ( ~ ) Mystery solved! It is the result of a windows update 330994 patch. You get the temp file after a change is made to your address book in Outlook express. You can see if you have the patch by going to IE....Help...About and seeing if the patch is listed there. I made a change to my address book this morning and "Bingo" the file appeared! Here is the info I obtained! Phewwwwww! Glad that's over with! One of the "fixes" from MS several months ago causes this glitch. What that file is (which I believe you will see is named "~") is your yourname.wa~ file which on my PC resides in C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book . That file is the backup for yourname.wab (the OE Address Book). But now, after the glitch, the .wa~ file is no longer getting updated when you make a change to Address Book. Rather it goes to your Desktop as "~" instead of to C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book as yourname.wa~. However, your Address Book, itself, is still getting updated. So unless you worry about the backup no longer being updated(what good is it, anyway??), you can delete the "~" file. Or if you cannot live without the updated backup .wa~ file, then just rename that suspicious "~" file to yourname.wa~ and send it to the C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book folder (replacing the existing and now outdated yourname.wa~ file). Supposedly MS was working on a fix many months ago, but I have seen no announcement of one yet, and none of the recent MS fixes have cured the problem. That "~" (tilde) file is most probably appearing as the result of installing the "April 2003, Cumulative Patch for Outlook Express (330994)". Microsoft is aware of the problem and is supposedly working on a fix. Many people are experiencing this problem and from what I've read about this problem that icon will also reappear when you reply to an e-mail and you have your Outlook Express set up to enter the persons e-mail address to your address book whenever you reply to an e-mail. You can either just put up with it or follow the uninstall directions for the patch at the link below. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/critical/330994/default.asp Hope this answers the question for some people.

Vince: Thank You very much for letting people know that! It really came in handy.

If I do what you say in your article and rename the file and send it to a folder will the ~ icon still pop up each time the Address book is changed. Do you you think that it is best to just deleite it each time it pops up?

Vince, Very good information, I knew someone that apparently had been fighting this for weeks and was going crazy trying to figure it out. Sent him a link to the thread and all is well. Thanks again for the info. Best Regards, Mesich

Many thanks, folks! But this problem is already solved ("~")! In the beginning, I thought I have only ONE problem or it is caused by the same. But now I know, i have more problems: there is still the problem while updating the addressbook in OE. When I click OK after adding or changing an entry the programm (Addressbook) hangs or loops. I don't know what, but it seems to be caused in conjunction with McAfee's Antivirus software. I hope anyone knows something or I can find out something about this , then I'll post it. I cann't believe that I would be the only with this problem: on my friend's computer it's the same problem unless there runs Win98, but also with McAfee. What I see as commons: - OutlookExpress (different versions: 5.5 and 6.0 SP.1) - McAfee's InternetSecurity (w. VScan 7.0) - No MS Office (Sun's OpenOffice) - Win98 and WinME (which is almost the same as Win98). - German Language until later. Ewald.