emails are missing after transferring them from OE to windows live mail

Hello:

I use Outlook Express for my emails. Today I was opening an attachment in one of the emails and suddenly it started new application. It told me that all my emails are being transferred to Windows live mail. I did not want them to be transferred and I did not know what WLM was (I think I got it when I updated my MSN). And as there was no cancel button, I restarted the computer using task manager. After I relaunched OE, noticed that many of my emails were missing. Some of them I found in Windows live mail, but most of my inbox emails are gone. Is there any way I can recover them? I read somewhere that it is possible to recover them from that .bak file that goes to the recycle bin after OE compresses the files, but there is no inbox.bak! all the other .bak files are there, except inbox

Any help would be great! Thank you for your time