“A problem occured when trying to open this message” when trying to access old emails in Windows Live Mail

Hi,

I am trying to help a friend who turned off their computer mid update causing all sorts of weirdness with the system after it finally booted again. Due to this, we decided a clean install was probably the best move and we did so.

It all seemed to be running well, then I noticed that I could no longer access my old emails in WLM.

I had backed up the entire appdata/Microsoft/Windows Live Mail folder and the account seems to be working fine other than this - new mails downloading, etc. The old messages seem to be there in their folders, I just can't open them.

Selecting an email causes the view panel to say they had "not been downloaded" and attempting to open them (via doubleclick) returned :

"A problem has occured when trying to open this message.  A problem has occured. Please try again"

Needless to say, trying again did not help.

I have uninstalled/reinstalled essentials and repaired it also via the installed programs menu.   -- to no effect

I have used esentutl.exe -d "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows Live MailMail.MSMessageStore"  -- to no effect

I even tried esentutl.exe -p "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows Live MailMail.MSMessageStore"--to no effect

Any help is much appreceated.

I have spent many hours on this already and am at my wits end.

Emi from Oz