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Hi jon40000,

I apologize for the inconvenience. As you have mentioned you are asked t o uninstall Windows Live Mail but you can't due to the possibility that emails may be deleted. I suggest that before you perform a clean installation you back up your files first to make sure that it will not be affected. To do this follow the steps given on this

link.

Once done, you may now perform a clean installation of Windows Essentials on your computer. Follow the steps given

here.

Hope this helps. Let us know how things turn out.

Thank you.

The same thing happened to me!!!! I am so upset that I found this thread and followed Helene's advice, because my Live Mail app was just fine, I only had 1 of every 300 messages be unreadable. After following this official Microsoft advice, I can't even open the email, gives the same Windows Live Mail Could Not Be Started error. I have critical business I need to do and this has blocked all access to my important business communications. You said uninstall and reinstall, but I can't afford to lose my emails! How does one take a risk at doing a clean install and still have 100% assurance you are not deleting priceless email history?

I made backups before deleting of course.  Is there now and easy way to import those back into new Live?

Use Import messages on the File menu (Alt-F I) to point to the backed-up store folder. For a successful import, copy the entire folder to a local drive, then import from the new folder. I would Workoffline, disconnect from the network and disable anti-virus before doing this to avoid unnecessary interference. Once the import is complete, give Windows Live Mail plenty of time to index the newly-imported messages before doing anything else in the program. When it's settled down completely, close down the program and wait ten minutes before rebooting the computer and re-enabling your anti-virus. Then you can open Windows Live Mail and go hunting. The imported folders may be in a folder called Imported folders under Storage folders.

I made backups before deleting of course.  

I have just tried dragging and dropping the .eml files to the new storage folder and that seems to work fine.  

I also note the system is downloading the 3gig of messages currently on the server so that should be most of them anyway.

thanks

I also deleted C:\Users\Study\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail

and C:\Users\Study\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live

The first one of those is the folder containing all your account details, folders, messages and calendars along with the database you were trying to defrag. The second contains, among many other things, all your contacts databases.

Now it starts but all my emails are gone.

Of course they're gone - you deleted them. Is the folder still in the recycle bin?