Outlook Express 5 fails to run

Clicking OE 5 icon results only in error message "identity switch canceled, etc.." OE 5 never ran on this Windows 95B OSR2 Pentium with IE5.5. So, I've had no access to any accounts menu. Prior email was thru Internet Mail, icon for which is gone. Uninstalling OE 5 and IE 5.5, going back to IE 4.7, and then reinstalling IE 5.5 and OE 5 has NOT fixed the problem. Regedit view of Current User Identities shows a single user identity, no accounts reference at all. It's not a bad OE 5 install as I have tried installing from two separate CD sources. I now can access my primary mail account only by running another mail client, Pegasus and it does not access my old address book or saved email. All this follows a second user using an optusnet cd to install a 2nd internet account on this single computer. How can I get OE5 to run on this Windows 95 machine?

 

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...port/kb/articles/Q224/4/63.ASP&NoWebContent=1
This is what M$ is trying to tell you. First go to Start\Run, type in Regedit and press Enter. In the left side of Regedit, go to this key, they look like folders.
Hkey_Current_User\Indentities\{bunchoflettersandnumbers}
With that highlighted, look to the right pane of Regedit, you will see the words "User ID" with bunchoflettersandnumbers to the right.
Both of the bunchoflettersandnumbers should be exactly the same. In other words, if you see 12345ABC-ABCD-12A1-ABC1-12A12AB12345 in the left, you should see 12345ABC-ABCD-12A1-ABC1-12A12AB12345 on the right. If not, right click on the word "User ID" in the right pane, select Modify and change it so it matches what you have on the left. Be sure to include the { } at the ends of it, if you have 0 in it, that is a zero.
Do not change anything on the left pane.

 

Thanks. M$ instructions were cryptic to me, wish yours had been posted by Microsoft instead of theirs. Before reading your feedback, I tried deleting the "bunch of letters and numbers in curly brackets" in the left pane after clicking the plus beside Identities and those numbers appearing. I used the right click delete option there. Then I close regedit, double clicked OE 5 and the blooming thing ran. But the setup wizard reported an imapp error when it tried to import my old mail. However, when I went to File, Import, Messenger, I got the option to import Microsoft Internet Mail 32 Bit and it worked. I looked at the Current User Identity settings again and OE5 had picked out a new identity number for me on its own. I guess the thing is idiot proof once it gets past its own errors. I spied a bit of freeware you might be interested in, Outlook Express Identity Identifier. You can save all the locations and id numbers with it in case the folders get lost. Thanks again, your instructions are so much clearer than those of Microsoft, I can feel my headache vanishing. So, maybe both of these methods can be used by W95'ers.