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Outlook Express crashing computer ??

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I have a client that when she opens Outlook Express it totally crashed her computer, it’s ver5. I have run some tests on the hardware and all seems fine, the only fail was on the board which showed protected mode instruction failed so thought maybe ram, tested ok with memetester.
read somewhere about Mcafee virus scan causing this but dunno, she had it but I finished uninstalling it, and went through the registry also for it. I do have plans to update IE to 6 but dont know if this wil fix the problem ?
any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers Turtle

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As far as updating to IE6 unless you have a reason , other than this, it is a big headache (especially for Win98!).
When you say “totally crashed her computer” do yu mean that it locks up or does it reboot or do you get an IPF or error message?
It may or may not be related to OE, it may be an OE symptom related to something else going on.

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It actually boots her right out of windows and she needs to restart, ends up with a black screen, and had been having to turn it off then back on, no error message.

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Check the size of her stored mail files.
(.dbx in her Identity folder under Application data)
They may be too big, and she is running out of memory.

A corrupt message or .dbx file can also cause this behavior.

As to installing IE6, I recommend caution.
The key here is the age of the driver for the video card.
If you can get a new driver for the card IE 6 may work.
If the driver pre-dates IE6, or the video card mfg is out of business IE 6 is apt to cause a memory leak, or worse problems.
Same for the DirectX 9 update.

I stop at IE 5.5 SP2 for my W98 boxes.
If you do not have a copy, you can download it from http://www.evolt.org

How much RAM and free HDD space?
For W98 and Me, I recommend 128MB to 384 MB of RAM, and at least the difference between installed RAM and 1GB for virtual memory.
If there is less than 500MB of free HDD space, that might be the problem.

Chas

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She has enough ram and her hard drive has plenty of free space. I will check the size of her dbx file tho.
I have never had a problem with updating IE to 6 with win98 before not like that anyway.

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You could also have copped Blaster worm, but only if she is running Win2K or XP (and it wouldn’t be XP with IE5). If she is running Win 95/98/ME, ignore this post.

Blaster uses a flaw in the RPC area of Win2K and will often crash the computer as it tries to connect to the internet.

Just a thought.

Alan

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Don’t think she has a virus as her NAV is update pretty much.

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Hi..

I know this is the obvious, but have you tried uninstalling Outlook and reinstalling? I would also look at msconfig and see what is starting up.

Good luck,
Enbee

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