My father in law has a problem with Outlook Express in that all E-mails "disappear" from the inbox folder. I checked the file size of inbox.dbx which was 61Mb. Compacting all folders had no impact.

After taking a backup, I downloaded DBXtract as recommended on the Microsoft site, but this failed to recover any E-mails (the filesize also dropped a a few k after running this).

I re-instated his E-mail and he was able to receive new E-mails.

The second time this happened I successfully recovered E-mail from inbox.dbx using DBXtract.

How do I:-
a) prevent this happening going forward - upgrading to Outlook 2007 is a possibility since he has a copy of Office 2007 which is yet to be installed.
b) recover the E-mails from the old inbox.dbx

OS is XP SP3. Outlook Express is version 6.

Thanks in advance.