This PC suddenly couldn’t access emails via Outlook Express.

When trying to run Outlook Express, it would immediately crash with the error: 0x800c013b

I take a look at the outlook DBX files, and they are all there.

I search for a solution on the net, and find that often, the sent items.dbx file gets corrupted (usually if the PC loses power during a folder compact operation).

So I rename sent items.dbx to sent items.dbx.old

But I still get the error.

I start to suspect that the problem is inbox.dbx, so I rename it, and now Outlook Express starts normally (minus emails that were in Inbox and Sent Items.

I shutdown and rename sent items back to its original name, and restarting OE shows that sent items is now back to normal.

Luckily the customer had already copied the emails from inbox, so there was no need to recover the emails… otherwise I would have needed to look for something like DBXtract to recover “lost” emails from inbox.