Carl,

 es I know the proper location of the Outlook Express files they are pretty well buried aren't they. After OE compacted some folders appeared to be fine others everything was gone. I went to the recycle bin and found them there. According to the large file sizes they chould be intact but were named with the extension .bak. I restored them to their original location (back to that buried OE folder and then also went there and copied them all (so as not to mess with them anymore) to a folder I made called C: outlook express. Once there I renamed them back to .dbx files and tried to import them back into OE. That is when I got the error message I posted above.

I've never had good luck importing or exporting messages with OE which is why I leave them in OE to begin with. However some idiot programmer thinks he knows what I want to do with my emails like compacting them, making them unuseable and then deleting them.

So the location I used C: oultlook express was a different storage folder which did not help. I even tried renaming them in the buried folder but no luck retrieving those either.