hi judy, this has been an exercise in futal fascination.  I can only think of
one unusual thing that may have triggered this problem.  i have recently
started getting a pop up in outlook and excel about macros with the choice of
disable/enabling.  I am not using outlook as my default mail program either.

Things that I've tried:

"outlookpath" /cleanrules
" /cleanfreebusy
" /cleanfolders
the result is the same; outlook email editor starts and puts the file
outlook.pst in the attachment.  is that the craziest thing or what?  our
administrator did a scan disk, virus check and defrag, but no errors were
found.