There is a counter in the registry that offers the prompt after 100 closings
of OE. Compacting manually doesn't reset the counter. However, if you are
otherwise fully patched at Windows Updated, this extra patch will solve your
problem among other things.

Patch KB918766:
http://tinyurl.com/mx3r2

This patch addresses some of the issues that were caused by KB911567.

Address Book problems.
Unsent templates appearing as sent.
Manually compacting will now reset the registry counter to Zero in WinXP/SP2
and also sends a copy of your dbx files to the recycle bin as a temporary
backup.

To complete the fix for .eml templates, a registry change is needed. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918766

Tom Koch also has this information at his site, along with a downloadable
Zip file to do the registry change for you. See:
http://www.insideoe.com/#kb918651
--
Bruce Hagen
MS-MVP Outlook Express
~IB-CA~

"Caryl" wrote in message
...
Whenever I close Outlook Express 6 I get the following message: "To free
up
disk space, Outlook Express can compact messages. This may take up to a
few
minutes."
Since I do not wish to compact this way, I have gone back to OE, gone
offline, closed all folders, and compacted all folders from the program
itself. However, the message still comes up when I again close OE.
I have noticed that there are a couple of different downloads mentioned in
different posts that can help with the compacting problem. What program
should I download? I have just upgraded to IE 7. Can the downloaded
program
be used with this version?
Thank you.