Hotmail transferred to Outlook but now I can’t access individual emails.

I was away for a week and when I returned and went to my hotmail account I got a different menu than I previously had.  The big difference was that the box that is on the far left of each email is not there.  When I tried clicking on the sender or the message nothing happened and an error shown  next was present  'undefined' is null or not an object.  How can I get back to my email accounts without losing all my older emails?  My operating system Windows XP Mediacenter.