[davnon]

I am using Windows XP w/ Office 2003 and Hotmail (Plus) for email. I have always used POP3 interface to connect between Outlook and Hotmail, and interfaced to all my email accounts with Outlook. A few months ago (I think when upgrading to Windows Live...) I have installed Outlook Connector and it seemed to be a very clean interface. However, since then, Outlook was hanging too many times (sometimes 2-3 times daily) due to Outlook Connector (Outlook Connector pop up window was frozen and empty and no response from Outlook) and I have decided to go back to the old style, which gave me no trouble. After uninstalling Outlook Connector and removing the account from Outlook, I followed carefully the help instructions at Windows Live Hotmail to re-establish the connection using POP3 (see attached PDF).
After going back into outlook, I did send/receive and let it do the synchronization until it was done (over 500 emails in my Inbox). To my great surprise, I found some unexpected behavior and some problems:

1. Hotmail messages are now combined with all other email accounts in the same Inbox
2. The other Hotmail folders do not appear in Outlook
3. After the messages were downloaded from Hotmail they do not appear in my online Hotmail account, only in Outlook (i.e. I will not be able to access my inbox from another computer -- which is the whole point of using Hotmail...).
4. Outgoing messages are not going out from Outlook, only from my online account.
5. All the Hotmail messages appear as unread, although I have read many of them.

I don't know what to do next. How to troubleshoot the outgoing msg problem? If I go back to Outlook connector, what would happen to all the messages that disappeared from the online Inbox? Has anyone else experienced similar problems with Outlook Connector? Is there another way to synchronize Hotmail folders?

Any help or suggestion will be greatly appreciated. Please don't suggest to move to Gmail. I have a Gmail account that works perfectly, but my email address at Hotmail is known to everyone and has appeared on my business cards for many years. (I guess I could forward all my Hotmail messages to Gmail, but it doesn't sound like a good idea as a permanent solution).

-Dror