Question about Outlook Express

This is a fairly new account, set up a couple of months ago, but it's now my main account so this is a BIG problem.

I use Thunderbird for emails, both sending and receiving. For some unknown reason I haven't been able to send emails using the Outlook account from Thunderbird; every time I tried I got an "account locked" message. It wasn't a big deal before today because I just picked another account and used that.

Today though I'm missing some information that I thought was coming in an email to this account, so I decided to log in to the webmail version and check the Spam folder (assuming you have one; I don't really know). And I can't get in, to any part of the email account - not the Inbox, not Spam - nothing.

When I got the login screen I typed in my account name and password. Then I got a screen saying my account had been locked and offering to send a security code to my phone. I don't usually like to give out my # but this seemed like a priority so I decided to try. Then I ran into another problem because in the entire list of country codes there was none for the United States. I decided to ignore that and just type in the number. As of right now, which is at least 15 minutes later, my phone has not received any text messages - which makes me wonder if Microsoft sent my security code to someone with the same number in Afghanistan (the first country on the list).

Eventually I got to my profile, but it took several minutes of searching before I located an "edit" link. Then when I clicked that I got a screen listing another email account, presumably the backup I set up. Unfortunately all I could see were the first two letters and I thought it was an old Gmail account that I've since deleted, so I clicked a button to have that address deleted. Then it wanted to send *another* security code somewhere. Since the previous one didn't ever arrive I wasn't sure what to do, until I remembered that my wireless internet modem has a phone number too. I used that one (and for some reason it assumed I was in the US), got the code, plugged it in - and now there is a message that this email will be deleted on November 17, *a full month from now.* In the meantime I can't seem to do a thing with this account. I can't check messages, I can't change anything - I can't even delete it.

I tried using Thunderbird to send a test message from one of my other accounts to the Outlook one and it did come through, so that end is still working - for receiving messages (I'm afraid to try sending any). But on the webmail side - I have no idea what is going on or what I should do now.

I apologize if this doesn't make sense but I'm really confused myself right now. I've had quite a few other email accounts over the years but I've never had as much trouble using one as I have with this Outlook account.

EDITED TO ADD: I did find some other threads here with the same topic but there were no useful answers there and the threads had all been locked by a moderator so I did some more searching and found this page:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/id-support

and submitted a request there. I thought I'd put this link up in case anyone else has a problem like mine.

I do want to mention that people might have trouble with the Captcha; it took me 5 or 6 tries before what I typed in (which I'd done carefully and verified, BTW) was accepted (I think).