Outlook Express 6 with XP always wants to compact messages in my folders after about every 100 uses.

I must have allowed it to do so without getting it stopped in time.

Now I have several critical email folders that are empty all the messages are gone. Why can't Windows and OE leave stuff alone. I hate programs that always think it knows best and what I want it to do. I don't care if it fills the hard drive with emails that should be my choice.

Anyhow I caught it and saw large files in the recycle bin with the names of the folders that are now empty but named .bak I restored them to where they were deleted from.

How do I get these folders back so they can be read. I tried to delete the empty ones with the same name and rename the .bak folders to .dbx folders but they are not being recognized by Outlook express now.

I thought there was something about it recreating folders because I had to rename something in there one other time when something messed up.

Sure hope all these emails are not lost some are very important and irreplaceable.

Tried importing the messages from another message store location but keep getting this error message.

Any ideas on how to recover these ? I'm considering going to something else for email as Outlook Express just seems to be too hard to save or import messages back into. I've followed the prescribed methods before and never have good luck getting things back. Also looking for something that will not compact my messages and screw everything up in the process.