[gjones]

I've never posted before so hope i am doing this correctly

I have a small buisness and use outlook express address book for a monthly mailing and also to send info to students in classes, I am around 9,000 email addresses and over 100 groups

my problems started with a windows update that had to be uninstalled.... now when i click and drag an email address to a group it will occassionally add the email address to another group in addition to the one i wanted....
i installed cclean which corrected another problem with outlook express from the update uninstall but it didnt fix the problem with the groups...
i also got an error message yesterday that i was out of space in my address book, i ran a defrag on my computer and it seems to be o.k now....
i am worried i am reaching the limits of outlook express address book but i cant find anything to replace it with ....i need the groups and the click and drag feature too...i've tried outlook and thunderbird and they do not have the features i need....
also anytime i export from my address book the groups get messed up...
microsoft support says the only thing they can suggest is to create another identity (a duplicate outlook express) the problem with this is all my groups will be lost and recreating over 100 groups from 9,000 email address would be overwhelming....
also i have a show this weekend where i will be adding another 1000 email entries....
if anyone can help me to get outlook express address book working correctly (where it doesn't add email addresses to the wrong groups and i can continue to grow at about 3000 new emails in 2007) or recommend other software that might work i would greatly appreciate it

i am not very technical i need anything i do to be fairly simple
thanks

 

[Girderman]

This one may be tough. I have two ideas. The less-likely one is data corruption for various possible reasonse. Heat, Hard Drive failing, Hard Drive errors, bad Power Supply and maybe more.

For certain, I would definately back up your business data before doing any trouble-shooting.

More likely is to simply believe what OE is telling you; that you are "out of space". Which sounds goofy given that (I bet) your Hard Drive (prolly) has PLENTY of "space", but then if you think it through OE is FREE, and prolly not intended to be used as "business software" so there are probably some crippling limits put into it in order to "encourage" you to buy XP Office and use Outlook (no "express") for your business endeavors.

I'd look up OE on MS Office's support page and see if you can't confirm that it's got a 10,000 name limit on the address book (a nice, round number which may be be pure coincidence with your problems).

For data corruption troubleshooting, the first think I would do is run "Start>Run>"chkdsk /f", reboot and see if it finds any HD errors.

What is your AV solution, and are your virus definitions updated ?

 

[gjones]

Thanks for your suggestions

I ran the chkdsk and i saw it running but it didnt give me any messages good or bad....do i need to look for the results?

i use norton 2007 with automatic updates, i also have adaware and have used ccleaner

i've talked to the microsoft outlook express techs and they give different answers on the limits, some say there are no limits another guy says everything has limits but he cant tell me what it is...they dont seem to know

i tried outlook and it didnt work for me....it did not import my address book from outlook express properly, all the groups were messed up, also outlook doesnt have the click and drag feature that outlook express has (with all these groups i really need the click and drag feature to set up classes easily)

 

[Girderman]

You are using features of OE I am unfamiliar with (the click & drag), so my usefulness will be limited.

There should be a file "chkdsk.log" saved either at "C:\" or maybe somewhere else that will report chkdsk's scan. While not critical, it would be nice to know if there were errors. You can search "My Computer" for "*.log" and find it that way.

In general, Norton is unpopular for a long list of reasons and I would keep it on the list of possible suspects causing problems. There may be some software conflict.

Personally, I would stop using CCleaner and any other Registry cleaners as I think they cause problems. Understand I have used them for years and am slowly arriving at this opinion, and it is just my opinion. Others will disagree. The business nature of your data makes it critical (i.e. MONEY) and I don't think the risk is justified.

I'd get rid of Norton too.

You might try some initial, general inquiries into possible malware infestation, such as running either a trencmicro or kaspersky on-line scan, and/or posting a HJT log, but I doubt malware is your problem. But then, knowing for sure that it is not is a good thing. If you have your OE data backed-up, the best/fastest/easiest solution may be to simply uninstall and then reinstall OE on the chance that it's files have become corrupt in some way.

The fact that Outlook won't import the OE data is disturbing, as it indicates possible corruption of your data, which is very, very bad. I think there are OE data base "fixit" programs you can run, but first and most importantly, do you have your OE data saved off the hard drive ?


EDIT***

Other than the OE problem, does your system have ANY other symptoms whatsoever ? If so, please describe them.