Emails lost in OutExpress, while upgrading 97 to 2k Office

Heya, this is my first time posting here so I hope you can help me

My pc has Windows Vista on it, but since I did not have the money yet I decided not to buy Office 2007 yet but install my old Office 1997 version.

Everything worked fine and I used outlook express(didnt say its name but it looked like express) as my email programm. Anyway, for somereason Outlook didnt want to start anymore it only said "Outlook could not be started" nothing else. No reason or anything.

So i gotmyself a Office 2000 CD and pressed on upgrade.
It installed everything but now I have no more outlook express on it and the new outlook that I installed lost every single email and did not import anything.

Is there any chance that my emails are still here ?? Because I never pressed on any delete button or something else. If press on Import in Outlook 2000 it says : cant find WAB.dll ...

To me it looks like Vista destroyed Office 2000 and 97 -

Id be VERY happy if anyone could help me get my emails back

Thanks in advance

 

Outlook Express keeps all its email in .dbx files. Start>Search and enter "*.dbx" (without the quotes, with the asterisk and dot) as the search term. Among the .dbx files it finds are your email messages.

If it doesn't find anything, in the Search window click on Tools>Folder Options and make sure "Show hidden files and folders" is checked, "Hide extensions for known file types" and "Hide protected operating system files" are both unchecked. Then run the Search again.

The address book is a .wab file. Run a Search for "*.wab" (without the quotes, with the asterisk and dot).

Once you've found the .dbx and wab files, use Windows Mail's (the email program that comes with Vista and is almost identical to Outlook Express) File>Import to get them into Windows Mail.

Outlook, on the other hand, keeps all its data...email, contacts, calendar, etc...in one .pst file.

 

Thanks a lot !!
I checked all the files but didnt find anything.

But then I looked for Windows mail.
Apparently the emails were there and Office 2000 just deleted the link to that programm.
I will continue using this now !