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?