Outlook Express re-registering file extensions

Augh! Good grief! My bitterness towards Microsoft grows stronger every day:

I use "The Bat!" for e-mail, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a very good alternative to Outlook. Within the past month, I have found that every time I boot up, my .eml file extensions have been bushwacked by Outlook Express. The real interesting part of this is that I can't even find where Outlook Express is starting. I don't have it in my Startup directory, and it's in none of the Run registry keys.

I'm running XP, and did find it in Startup for one of the other accounts on my machine so I removed it from there. The best gag is that when I deleted the Outlook Express folder (since I can't locate IExplorer uninstall anywhere now) it magically reappeared moments later. I deleted from boot Command Prompt to finally kill it, but something is creating the directory on bootup.

Anyone had similar problems, or have suggestions for tracking down the culprit? I'm about at the end of my patience with Microsoft and Windows.

 

I have not encountered that problem, but take a look at the following article and see if it might help you. You could just do the uninstall steps and then not reinstall and see if that takes care of the problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;Q256219



http://download.microsoft.com/download/outlookexp/utility/5/w98/en-us/OE5RegClean.exe

Another thing is MS Messenger running at startup also? The two of them are tied together in XP.

I would also run the following command from a command prompt

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove