Outlook 2000 oddities since clean profile

[Paul]

My Outlook file was getting huge, and always got larger when I deleted
items, rather than shrinking. I figured maybe a new .pst would get things
whipped into shape, so I created a new .pst and copied all my email to it.
That's when the problems started.

I tried to reroute to the new .pst as default, but it started showing a
mirror of it. I had 2 Inboxes, 2 Sent Items folders, 2 of every folder I
ever created. If I read a new message, the "new message" count would
decrease by 1 in both Inboxes. Everything was an exact duplicate, mirroring
itself.

I tried all sorts of things, including a complete uninstall/reinstall of the
entire Office suite, all of which failed. Outlook would open just long
enough to see my folders, then it would disappear without warning or error
message. Finally I found a reference for command-line repairs and got it to
work by running outlook.exe /cleanprofile.

At that point I thought everything was OK. Outlook was stable, all my email
was there. All I had to do was re-create my modifications of what columns to
show, etc.

However, since then I have had a really odd problem: the new mail chime
sounds, and nothing appears in my Inbox. However, I do still get a lot of
mail. I have also noted that there are 2 .pst files on the hard drive. One
is outlook.pst and the other is outlook0.pst.

Both .psts are being updated, though there is a time difference in their
"last modified" time of a few hours. Right now there is about a 2 hour
difference in their modification time.

Could some of my email be going into outlook.pst and other into
outlook0.pst?

This is getting really frustrating, I need to find a complete solution.

Any assistance or guidance you could offer would be appreciated.

Thanks.
Paul

 

[Paul]

Well, it gets more strange...

I downloaded Thunderbird and tried to import my .pst files. It couldn't do
it, and crashed partway through. It did show me three things though:

1. Both .psts are being marked as modified every time I use Outlook, but
apparently only outlook0.pst is really holding new mail.

2. Outlook is doing something weird with some messages. In Thunderbird,
between 10 and 20 messages (depending on which .pst I was importing) showed
up as new in an Inbox. Most were from late 2005, and I had read and filed
all of them in Outlook.

3. As I suspected, Outlook has not really deleted a lot of messages. The
Deleted Items folder in Thunderbird contained over 2,100 messages dating
back to January 2000 (when I first installed Outlook)! I always empty my
deleted items folder in Outlook on a regular basis. No wonder my .pst files
are so huge.

Has anyone ever experienced anything like this? I have got to get things
stabilized and purged.

Thanks.
Paul