windows xp Exporting messages from Outlook Express to Outlook

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An elderly member of our PC Users Group has been running OE6 on a WinXP PC and has recently been given a Dell D630 laptop with Win7. His OE storage is extraordinary being some GBs in size with about 100 folders.

I used the OE6 Import Export Messages to an Outlook PST file and then, on the Win7 laptop, managed to migrate the messages from the PST store to Thunderbird. However, in about eight folders some of the most recent messages did not appear (they were

not in the PST store). In one folder there were 210 messages missing with most of the other seven folders having 2 to 20 messages missing.

I went back to OE6 on the WinXP PC and deleted all the messages that had migrated successfully and then deleted the empty folders leaving just the eight folders and the messages that had not migrated to Thunderbird. I also emptied the Deleted items

folder. (At this point I foolishly forgot to compact all folders.)

I then tried to export all messages again to Outlook. The progress bar went to about half way and froze (we waited for about 20 minutes but no progress). I noted the folder in which this happened. The only way to cancel this task was to use the Shutdown

in Task Manager (ending the two tasks did not work). I then opened OE6 and opened the folder in which the export process froze. There I found one message (which was a scan of a line drawing and about a page of text) which was showing as 1+Gb in size; as there

was a printout of the message, we deleted that message.

At this point, I finally remembered to do a compact all. When I checked the OE6 store location, I noticed that most of the dbx folders were now much smaller but that there were some dbx files for folders we had emptied and deleted and quite a few dbx

files for deleted folders showing in blue.

(As an aside, could the DBX files in blue be deleted? And could the DBX files for deleted folder still showing in black be deleted? Would this impact on OE running properly? Could I delete the unwanted dbx files and delete the folders.dbx; would this

have OE rebuild a folder.dbx with just the wanted folders when OE is opened or would OE just not work?)

We tried again to export the messages to Outlook but now the progress bar did not show any movement and we again had to use the Shutdown in Task Manager.

I suspect that the first attempt to export messages to Outlook has created a corrupted file (due to the failure of the process to complete and the Shutdown of the PC).

Do you know where I might find this corrupted export file so I can delete it or do you know what I can do to export the remaining messages in OE6 to Outlook so I can use the PST file to migrate these remaining messages to Thubnderbird?

Any help you can offer to resolve this problem would be much appreciated.

 

 

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