Having downloaded and installed Windows Live Messenger from the Microsoft website I am having a problem directly accessing my email from within Live Messenger. Clicking on the Mail icon within Live Messenger it requests me to sign-in and then the following message appears: “Recovering the Live Windows Database”. Shortly after, an error message appears: “Windows Live Mail could not be started as could not open the Live Mail Message Store. Existing messages under Orphaned Accounts 0×00000000.2”. Then a final message pops-up: “Computer may be out of memory or disk full 0×80070002”. There is plenty of memory and disk space, and all the other Live Messengers accounts on the computer work perfectly, it is just my account. The computer is running Windows XP Service Pack 3 with all updates.

This seems to be a relatively common problem which other users of Windows Live Messenger have experienced. As the problem is only occurring for your account the most likely reason for this issue is that your Windows Live Mail store has become corrupted. Therefore, we should try to recreate the mail store for your account. Be aware, this will remove all messages stored on your computer. This is not so much an issue if all your messages are stored on the server (assuming you are using the Windows Live Mail service) since they can be re-downloaded to your computer once a new mail store has been created. However, if you are using another email service as well (such as your ISPs email), which does download the messages to your computer, these will be removed. However, we do have a method to re-import such messages, which I will take you through once we have fixed the mail store.

The first procedure we need to complete is renaming the current mail store. This will force Windows Live Messenger/Mail to realise that the mail store is no longer there and then recreate a new mail store. Close Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail. Open My Computer or Windows Explorer then go to the following directory: C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail . Be aware, you may need to enable the display of hidden files and folders to see the folder structure. To do this, go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options” > “View” tab and enable “Show hidden files and folders” then click OK. Once in the “Windows Live Mail” folder rename this folder to “Windows Live Mail Old”. Start Windows Live Messenger or Windows Live Mail and attempt to access your email. At this point the mail store folder should be recreated.

Now that the mail store has been recreated we can import your accounts and email. Close Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail. Go into the following directory: C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft . Here you should see the old mail store folder (Windows Live Mail Old) and the new mail store folder (Windows Live Mail). We will copy the account information files from the old mail store to the new mail store. In order to determine the files to copy we need to see their file extensions, so we need to enable the display of file extensions. Go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options” > “View” tab and untick “Hide file extensions for known file types” then click OK. Go into the “Windows Live Mail Old” folder. You should see one (or more) files in the folder with the extension .oeaccount. Copy these files from the “Windows Live Mail Old” folder into the new “Windows Live Mail” folder. Restart Windows Live Messenger or Windows Live Mail to access your email. At this point, the folder structure for your email should be recreated.

Finally, we will re-import your email from the old mail store into the new mail store. Fortunately, Windows Live Mail has an easy method to complete this operation. In your email interface, go to the “File” menu > “Import” > “Messages” > “Windows Live Mail”. Point the import utility to the old mail store folder (Windows Live Mail Old) and it should import the messages from the old mail store into the new mail store.