A colleague is having problems with Outlook Express. On opening the application, the following message appears: ‘msimn.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created’. I have located this problem in the Microsoft Knowledge Base - Q258034. One of the possible causes mentioned is that the .DBX files are marked as read-only, but I have been unable to locate any .DBX files on the local hard drives. These are clearly essential files, but what might have caused them to go missing? Is there any way to fix this problem, other than re-installing either Outlook Express or Windows 2000? (more…)

I am running Office 2000 on Windows 98. I received a Word document from what should be an impeccable source. However, it’s a newsletter and the contributions came from about 4 people, so I guess a virus is not out of the question. The file came as an attachment to an Outlook message. I saved the attachment, whenever I try to open it the following message appears: ‘This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down’. When I click on details I receive the following: ‘WINWORD caused an invalid page fault in module WINWORD.EXE at 015f:300f3573′. Can you shed any light on the problem? (more…)

After initiating my Transact connection a small window headed ‘Work Offline’ appears. The text says ‘No connection to the Internet is currently available. To view Internet content that has been saved on your computer, click Work Offline. Click Try Again to attempt to connect’. Clicking ‘Try Again’ allows me to access the internet but it is an unnecessary extra step. The same window has to be negotiated when accessing web sites via desktop shortcuts. The problem has existed for about a year ever since I took on the Transact service. The ‘Work Offline’ box under File menu is not ticked. I have contacted my ISP but they are unsure about how to fix the problem. Any suggestions? (more…)

The WAV files on my computer refuse to open and play. All the WAV file icons have changed to a picture of the flying windows logo even though they still have the .EXE extension. Double left-clicking on any WAV file has no effect and right-clicking on the file (which brings up a menu) doesn’t have the ‘Open’ or ‘Play’ commands. Would you have any ideas on how I can bring these files back to life, apart from reinstalling Windows? I am running Windows 98. (more…)

Could you tell me if there is a way to save files from the Temporary Internet Files folder? Due to space problems I have to regularly empty the folder, but there are a couple of sites that I visit regularly and that load much faster if the site is cached. Short of trolling through the lot and not deleting them with the rest (very time consuming, and they are usually overwritten by then) I was wondering if you know of a better way to save the wanted files. I tried copying the files to a different folder and moving them back when I need them, but this did not work. (more…)