I recently got back from a 4 week vacation, it was great. I had taken many pictures and the day I returned I downloaded them to my laptop, an older Toshiba running XP, SP2, no problem. The next morning I got up to admire the downloaded pixs and found the Toshiba non responsive. I tried everything but finally gave up and took the hard drive out and was able to access it from an enclosure I had used to upgrade the Toshiba some time ago, a product called Ez-Gig by Apricorn. I was relieved to find I could see all the pictures but my Outlook was a different matter. I use Outlook as the client to handle my HotMail account and so in the week/s that it took to finally determine that the drive was OK I simply used HotMail directly. But the real issue became all the contact information that I had in Outlook. I started using a desktop that also ran XP, SP2 and found a .pst file that I transfer to the desktop and fired up Outlook. I seemed OK at first glance but then I realized that it was not the most current information, but an older version, perhaps a year or two back. As much as I try to search for another more current .pst file on the laptop drive, nothing shows up. Is it possible that it had some strange permission that doesn't let it be seen, it must be there somewhere?