all my setting have dissapeared. i have no records of calendar or emails etc..

look for *.pst files on your hardrive.

The largest and most recently modified one will be your calender, contacts and email repository. Take a back up copy of it and then try and re-acquaint your outlook application with the personal pst file.

Have you tried a system restore to an earlier date?

i havent tried restore as didnt want to **** up anything else
anyone talk me through this?

OK, Outlook stores all your emails etc. in one great big file with the suffix of .pst (sometimes .ost but that's if you're running a networked version). You need to use the windows explorer find function to look for files that end in .pst. When you find it / them make a copy as you would any other file. Then in Outlook use the import function in the file menu to import the data back in (may create an archive file but that shouldn't be a problem). Sorry I can't be more sepcific, I'm on brand new laptop and haven't set Outlook up yet and don't want to launch it until I've got the settings to hand.

Is Outlook opening correctly but not showing you your stuff or is it saying that it can't find the .pst file and asking for one?

Try going to the file menu and selecting open outlook data file, the requester should open in the default folder. On my system the file that holds my Outlook data is outlook.pst (there'll probably be another called archive.pst which should hold archived data).

The actual path the the file is long. You'll need to open your C: drive and step through "documents and settings" then the appropriate account folder followed by "Local Settings" (which is usually a hidden file so you'll need to be able to view these) then "Application Data", "Microsoft" and finally "Outlook".

The file that Outlook uses by default can be controled in Control Panel Mail.

thanks all. laptop font looks weird too 🙁

not been my week eh.

If you're using Vista then do a system restore, – it rocks and saves a lot of other farting around. You can also undo it if it didn't help. It's way less painless than looking around to see which setting has been screwed up

done that now too cheers

did it work ok?

think so but i still need to run spybot search and destroy again?

imho probably not. Those things often go and mess with your registry and cause more trouble than they are worth. Go ahead if you are worried though because if it does 'find' things, you make the changes and Outlook gets screwed up you can always do a system restore again and everything will be back as it was

i got this virtumonde virus thingy i trying to get rid of

ooo painful. It will probably still be there then. By all means update your version of SpyBot and run it again. If it kills your Outlook again then use system restore to go back a few days again.

If Spybot doesn't do it then have a shot with the MS product http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/. I know there will be MS haters out there but I've had windows defender (that is part of essentials) work where Spybot/Lavasoft/CCleaner etc. have failed before. However, as always, which works best changes from month to month.

cheers