ToolsOptionsMaintenanceStore folder will reveal the location
of your Outlook Express files. Press the Tab key to highlight the folder
location, then Ctrl+C. Close OE, then StartRunCtrl+V will put the location
in the box - Click OK and you'll see the OE files. Otherwise, write the
location down and navigate to it in Windows Explorer.

In WindowsXP, 2K & 3K, the OE user files (DBX and WAB) are by default
marked as hidden. To view these files in Explorer, you must enable
Show Hidden Files and Folders under StartControl PanelFolder
OptionsView.

And as DGuess said. DBXpress is the *only* tool that will retrieve messages
lost while compacting, but possibly not all.
--
Bruce Hagen
MS MVP - Outlook Express
~IB-CA~



"David Smith" wrote in message
...
Thanks for your help. Searched the HD for *.dbt but nothing showed up. For
some reason when I searched for *.dbx nothing showed up as well even
though I know there are dbx files on the HD?

Later....

David S


"DGuess" wrote in message
...
DBXpress might have servered you better. It will read the contents of the
hard drive and search for those lost messages. DBXTract will only extract
and recover from existing DBX files that haven't been compacted or
corrupted enough to be unreadable. It's the nature of the DBX file
structure.

When OE compacts, it creates a DBT file to use in the process of copying
the available messages to a new file thus removing the old messages. If
you still have the DBT file, copy it to another folder, rename it to .DBX
instead then run DBXTract. If no DBT file, DBXPress will hunt them if
they haven't been overwritten. It works quite well as I've had to use it
to recover messages on the wife's computer before they could get backed
up.



"David Smith" wrote in message
...
Hi Folks,

My system crashed while it was compacting messages in Outlook Express 6.
System is XP SP2. Purchased and tried running DBXtract from the
OEHelp.com
website with no success. When file compacting does OE write the
originals to the disk anywhere? The .dbx files still have their original
size but the is nothing in them and compacting shinks them Any
suggestions?

Thanks for any help....


David S