Mozilla 1.6 will not install

I had Mozilla 1.6 running until this morning. When I brought up Mozilla the browser was there but no mail at all. Finally I uninstalled 1.6 and deleted all instances of Mozilla from the Registry. Restarted the computer and installed 1.6 again with the same results no mail. I had a copy of 1.5 and installed it and it works fine, no problems. I downloaded a fresh copy of 1.6 after installing it I can't even open 1.6. I also tried in the start up menu no joy. I can't even access the profile mgr.
I did get this error message C\Documents and Settings\MCol\ApplicationData etc is not a valid Win32 application.
I would really appreciate any help you can give me.
Thank you

 

Marilyn,

When you have both Mozilla 1.6 and 1.5 installed, are you sharing a Profile?

When you uninstalled Mozilla 1.6, did you reboot the PC before reinstalling?

Did you check to see that the GRE folder has been uninstalled, before reinstalling?
C:\Program Files\Common Files\mozilla.org\GRE

This is water under the bridge, but what you could have done, when you discovered your mail had disappeared:

With Netscape and Quick Launch closed:
In the C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\Mozilla Folder
Delete: registry.dat

When Netscape is restarted it will prompt for a new Profile
Use the existing Profile name, i.e., the same Profile name as currently being used.

For some reason Windows XP users seem plagued by a frequently corrupted registry.dat file. I don't know why this happens, but it does.

Ramona

 

Ramona,
I guess I wasn't clear enough in explaining what I did. I first uninstalled 1.6 because I couldn't get my mail at all. I did reboot the computer. Then I installed 1.5 from a disk everything went good so I uninstalled 1.5 and installed 1.6 once again but the same problem was there, no mail.
After I read you reply I realized I did not delete the GRE folder so I uninstalled it, deleted the GRE folder and installed 1.6 once again and this time 1.6 is working beautifully. Thank for the info about the GRE folder. Thanks also for the information on what I should do if this happens again. I never thought about the registry.dat but if it happens again I will try your instructions before uninstalling.
Thanks a ton, I really appreciate it.

Marilyn