[pmmail-list] It Was Bound To Happen -- HELP !!

[Derek W. Keoughan]

Phil Kane wrote:
> I have been using PMMail from its inception in the OS/2 days, and 
> continued to use it when we went to Win 98, then NT, and now XP.  It was 
> working really well up until last Thursday when XP had a major failure, 
> and had to be reinstalled.  From that time on, any attempt to start 
> PMMail results in an error message "The application failed to initialize 
> properly (0xc0000018).  Click on OK to terminate the application." 
> Reinstalling a fresh copy of PMMail 2K Pro (or Standard) did not make 
> any difference.  My wife's machine runs the same WinXP and PMMail setup 
> as mine does and it works just fine.
> 
> Looks like it's still a WinXP problem and I'm sick and tired of messing 
> with reinstalls of that monster - everything else seems to work OK, and 
> I have a lot of apps to reinstall in spite of having full backups and 
> MS's Transfer "Wizard" files available.
> 
> OK  - MY MS rant is over.  Now I need some constructive help.

Shot in the dark... XCOPY all the FOLDER.* files from the PMMail storage 
directories to somewhere safe, so you have a backup copy, then delete 
all the FOLDER.BAG files.

With 4OS2 (now freeware), this is dead simple...

MD \Save
cd \Save
XCOPY \PMMail-dir\Folder.* . /s /e /c /h /r
del   \PMMail-dir\Folder.BAG /s /p  (this may be a 4NT specific command 
line, it's all I use)

You will lose all the icons showing "read status" or "replied to", etc - 
but you might be able to open it again...  I suspect a corrupted index 
(which is what the BAG file is) is to blame.

Failing that, put the copies back in place, and you're back where you 
started.

You might also try doing a search for FOLDER.BAG, and sort by date... 
rename the latest one or two to *.BAK or something, and try to start it 
up...

I myself gave up on PMMail in August 2006, and am now on Thunderbird... 
the internal editor is fine for me, and with backups, I've never lost a 
message, so the lack of individual files isn't a problem either.  320GB 
of hard drive space is about a hundred bucks these days... $200 with a 
mirror drive. :)

Sure is nice to be able to see HTML formatted eMails - the main reason I 
left it behind (though I still have some 10 years of messages archived 
in there).

Hope this helps... it's been a while since I had to futz with it, after all.

-Derek


-- 

Derek W. Keoughan,
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