Windows has a habit of not reporting what it's actually doing quite right most times so I would hazard a guess that it was compacting the In Box at the time when you broke out of the cycle.
Now just because nothing appears to be happening doesn't mean that Windows has frozen just that the CPU is busy reading the RAM and crunching numbers.
I would guess that when you broke out of the cycle you have erased the entire In Box and from what I've seen of OE you have lost all the e-mails stored in the In Box permanently.
If you have a recent backup you may be able to recover some of the lost E-Mails but the rest have disappeared forever unless you are willing to spend a lot of money in recovering the data. This will involve stripping the HDD and coating the platters in a green goup and then the Data Recovery House can Read each layer of Data that has ever been written to the HDD. I've only ever seen this used by Government Agencies in Criminal or Terrorist Matters and it's not something that is cheap. The last time that I heard of it being used was a while ago and it cost about 130K $ to do.
Is your lost data worth this? If it is you'll also have to factor in the cost of a replacement HDD and reloading the system somehow.
Col
