I have been using Outlook 98 for email (running Win98 on a 266
E-machine).  Several days ago, I opened Outlook and got the following
error message:  "Unable to open your default e-mail folders.  The file
C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\exchangenet.pst could not
be accessed.  Acces is denied."  When I click OK, a dialog asks "Would
you like to open your default File System folder instead?"  If I click
No, Outlook closes; if I click Yes, it opens a view of My Computer.

The only think I can think of is that, prior to the first time I tried
to open Outlook and received the above message, I had installed some new
(graphic design) software on my system that (unbeknownst to me) left me
with less free disk space than the size of my .pst file.  I have since
freed up more than twice this volume of space, to no avail.

Outlook seems unable to either send or receive messages now, nor have I
figured out how to access any of my existing messages (in various
folders, as well as Inbox).  Also, Windows Explorer will not allow me to
make a copy of exchangenet.pst - when I attempt to paste a copy into a
backup directory (so I could try to "rough up" my original to get it
open somehow), I get the error message "Cannot copy exchangenet.net.
Access is denied.  Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and
that the file is not currently in use."

I would very much appreciate any help that anybody could offer me with
this problem--in the meantime, I am using Netscape's mail client but
have some important stuff stored in the Outlook files.

Also another problem I've had with Outlook is that about 3 weeks ago, my
incoming mail filters stopped working - instead of sorting my incoming
mail into various folders according to the rules I set up, all my
messages started just being deposited in my inbox.   I don't have any
idea why filtering used to work but doesn't now, but this problem is
definitely secondary to the first problem, not being able to access my
inbox.

Thank you very much in advance.

Heather Duncan
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