I'm not even sure I can adequately articulate what I did
that made them go away but I will try.

I am using Office XP Home @ my home on a Compaq Evo PC
that I've had for just about a year. I do NOT use Outlook
Express cuz I don't really get the concept. Anyway, I
have an Earthlink DSL connection and mail account as well
as a Hotmail mail account and my Outlook was configured
to retrieve the mail from both accounts until yesterday.
I decided to set up an additional Hotmail account and
tried to configure Outlook so that it would automatically
retrieve mail from the new account as well. Well needless
to say I didn't do it right so it didn't work. So, I
deleted the new email account setting from my Outlook
configuration.

I was very surprised when I received a message after
closing down and re-opening Outlook that informed me that
my Outlook configuration had been changed and that the
system had to make some sort of adjustment as a result of
the change. I was not given the choice to overide the
adjustment and when I opened my Contacts file it was
empty as was my in-box.

To make a long story short, I was able to find and
retrieve my contacts and in-box but I still wasn't happy
with the way the files were configured. The root file in
the Outlook folders list read "archive.pst" rather
than "Outlook Today" and rather than leaving it alone I
wanted to get it to look right. Big mistake! After trying
several different things, I finally just changed the name
of the archive.pst file to outlook.pst. Of course I
didn't make a copy of it nor did I back it up before I
changed the name! Of course I know better.

So anyway, when I re-opened Outlook, my contacts and in-
box were again empty. But here's the strange thing - my
calendar still has the appointments on it that I had and
my "Sent Items" folder still has everything in it that it
had at the start of the day yesterday. I've searched
everywhere for pst files and contacts files and while
I've found the old shortcuts that used to take me to
those files the shortcuts are unable to find the files
(no surprise). I figure that if my calendar files and
sent items files are still there, then the other files
MUST be somewhere in the machine, mustn't they? O.K. I
admit I did a really stupid thing but just changed the
name of a file shouldn't change the contents of the file,
should it?

I tried the system restore utility but that did nothing
to solve the problem. I can rebuild the contacts if I
have to but are my inbox messages gone forever? Oy! I'm
happy to say that this is the first real problem I've had
with Windows XP although I must say that the way the
Outlook files are configured is confusing to say the
least.

I greatly appreciate any assistance anyone can provide.
Thanks in advance!