Compact manually to start.

Click on Outlook Express at the top of the folder tree so no folders are
open. Then: File | Work Offline (or double click Working Online in the
Status Bar). File | Folder | Compact all folders. Don't touch anything until
the compacting is completed.

Compact Your OE Folders:
http://www.insideoe.com/files/maintain.htm#compact

If the problem still exists, you have another issue. Read on:

The problem is with the registry counter that gives you the prompt after 100
closings of OE. It is being increased quicker than it should be and even if
you are not using OE.

There is a growing number of programs and actions that may be causing this
after installing SP3. Do you have any of the following?

IBM Rapid Access keyboard (driver) RAKDLL.DLL
Windows {Desktop} Search
Mailwasher
Nero plug-in(s)

Opening EML files while OE is closed will also contribute to the registry
count.

Various anti-virus, anti-spyware and third party firewalls, especially if
they were running when you installed SP3.

Archived thread discussing this issue in June 2008:
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...d35fbfa457fd6f

In the case of Windows Desktop Search, (the #1 offender), you have to tell
it to stop indexing OE.

Windows {Desktop} Search. Set Desktop Search Options:
http://www.microsoft.com/australia/w...h/options.mspx

In Windows {Desktop} Search: Control Panel | Indexing Options. Click: Modify
and clear the check box for Outlook Express.

In the case of Nero Scout, see Item 2.3 on page 8 here.
ftp://ftp6.nero.com/user_guides/nero...oScout_Enu.pdf

In the option to exclude selected file types from indexing, be sure to add
these file types:

..eml, .dbx & .nws
--

Bruce Hagen
MS-MVP [Mail]
Imperial Beach, CA


"pinger" wrote in message
...
For the last month or so, OE6 insists that I compact several times a day.
I'm happy to say that I am not going into OE several hundred times daily
which would normally trigger such activity. I dutifully let the
compacting
process run and disappear by itself. As a hint of something that might be
an
indication of a problem is that about half way though I get a "stop"
stating
that there is an OE file open. There isn't. When I close the dropdown,
the
process finishes. A few minutes later...perhaps...it wants to go through
the whole process again. Frankly, it getting to be quite an annoyance.
When
I click cancel....maybe sixty seconds later it's there again, prompting.

Additionally, after reading a lot of posts on the subject of compacting,
it's clear that there are a lot of issues regarding the possible loss of
old
emails. I have several thousand emails on my machine and really don't
want
them going anywhere. What is the conventional thinking on seeing that
they
aren't lost?