Everything is fine with ultiple pop accounts and then one day it breaks
and refuses to pop but can smtp.

You have tried everything that MS and others suggest, but no
avail...including article Q290684, SP2 and a wing and a prayer....

Well I seem in my case to have fixed the problem and can at least
retrieve email but sometimes I need to still enter the password/hit
ok...

In the registry even after deleting the pop account from outlook 2003
it keeps some records on unread emails...I found this in the registry
looking for the pop account as a key and thought that's strange given I
have deleted the pop account - why is it still retaining some data on
unread email records?

Once I deleted this and then recreated the pop account in outlook it
now works as it used to!

No reboot, just restart outlook.

Outlook must detect some old records to re-use rather than delete and
create from fresh. Somehow the number of unread records got stuck at
some point....yippee!

Hope this