Outlook 03 POP3 server is downloading duplicate emails and hanging

is this a "yahoo mail plus" account, or are you using something like freepops or Ypops?

you need to go delete the messages from the real server-side yahoo mailbox, something's corrupt... your outlook isn't finishing the session gracefully, and thus telling itself 'do it again'

this is an add-on that installs into outlook which will easily find/delete duplicates for you, if you need it:
http://www.ablebits.com/outlook-duplicates-remove/index.php

This is a yahoo mail plus account; ie she pays for it and yahoo hosts it.  I already deleted the messages and now the offending message has nuked a pst file, which I am attempting to correct.  Your program above costs money, and we don't have extra funding.

wait maybe i pasted the wrong link lemmie double check...

yes sorry this is the free duplicate remover i intended:
http://www.vaita.com/ODIR.asp

now - fixing the pst, how's that going?  scanpst?

I walked someone at her office through it today and although it said it was repaired, it shows no folders and a folder size shows 0 kb.  I'm going in tomorrow to look at it and if I can't fix it there will throw it on my flash drive and bring it home to play with it.

Oh, and oddly enough, the pst file itself WAS 400MB+ but is now 259MB+ even though "folder size" says 0.  Go figure.

Well sometime yesterday the 400MB pst file is now.....265kb.  I have this hideous feeling that I will need to go back to the last non-overwritten-backup on 4/8 and recover what I can there.  I don't suppose the 265kb limit could be deceptive? Or did it really nuke 400mb of email?  HELP!

it probably did nuke them - thinking everything inside was corrupt, and removing each item that it thought was corrupt, which turned out to be everything.

you didnt repair the only copy right?

what if you open her pst (without repairing it) in outlook 2007 on a different machine, then export from there to a new pst?

I plan to try a few different things, and yes, indeed, i scanned the only copy of it because I thought the backpack drive had a copy and it got overwritten yestereday.  I found an archived copy from 4/8 that I plan to restore and get the folders back out of, but that means 3 weeks of personal emails are missing.  I think the good news is that by separating the person from teh business, i think I avoided blowing up the business emails along with the personal, but folks don't seem to understand that.  I saw an obscure post somewhere that linked a wireless mouse to Outlook 03 problems, but that's the first I've heard of that too.  I never anticpiated having THIS many issues with Outlook 03 and a POP3.

So scanpst.exe creates a backup before it scans.  I have renamed the bak file to pst and moved to another machine that is xp with outlook 2003.  It still will not open the file.  Are there other freeware repair tools? The user wants to go back to Outlook Express but I think that is a bad idea since MS won't support it anymore.  I may just take her back and deal with the fallout if it breaks I guess.

you might take the pst and try to push it into her live mailbox (or a new, empty test one) via exmerge?

What is exmerge? I'd love to try that.  The file still shows 119 mb but when I compacted it, it compacted to 10kb.  is it possible that the 119MB is misleading?

 I managed to find a copy of the pst file before I split it dated 4/9, so I could at least recover the personal items up to 4/9.  The more I poke around, the more concerned I get because her hard drive is at 8% availability (for a 40GB hd) and the backpack drive she uses was using a SYNCH method EVERY time a file is accessed, which for a 500MB pst file, I believe was bringing things to a screeching halt.  I turned off the synch function, I'm going to advise her NOT to use her wireless mouse for a week and we will remove the 6gb of music she has to the backpack drive.  I believe all this should resolve the freeze up problems.  The last measure would be to turn of Windows Defender scans of emailed documents, but I want that to be a last resort.