Jerry,
Not sure exactly what you are doing. First, you MUST install NIC/network adaptor drivers too. You will need to down load them to another PC and place them on a CD or a ZIP stick of 2 gig or less (bigger ones needs drivers too with XP) On Outlook, if it was installed, if you re-install Outlook it will pickup old PST file. It will have to be re-installed.
Figure out yet why I told you to wait for new HD and start over? You could wind up doing this again soon. Do not give up on XP as with a fresh install on a new HD with good hardware is a still a solid machine for some tasks. Win7 is a new can of worms in other regards.
In case anyone is interested....
My Dell tower is up and running after over a week of hard labor working on it.
In one way or another, the postings here helped me.
The major hurdle was rampant ignorance on my part of the nitty-gritty workings of XP and Office.
Previously I had just enough passing interest to do whatever work I wanted to do.
This week was a tremendous learning experience; I learned a lot and learned that I have a lot more to learn.
Here's what happened....
Whatever caused the initial problem of the corrupted-file also may have affected Dell's built-in network-adapter.
I ended up buying a NIC; then I was able to get on the Internet.
A second problem was mis-information from Microsoft caused confusion; their website stated Outlook-Express came with XP.
It took awhile to sort out that Dell shipped it with Outlook.
And it took awhile to get Outlook configured the way it was before for two users; since Comcast was no help, I ended up figuring it out myself even though Microsoft's help-files were difficult to follow (I think they assume you've done the operation before and so know what the major terms mean).
We intend to make periodic print-outs of our email-address-books just to have that resource available in hand in case of a computer catastrophe; we realized that was the one thing we missed the most when we went to use our laptop.
I still have not figured out a way to get our Google "Favorites" back in place.
Also, I'd like to make a system-backup someday to an external-drive (that I don't have as yet) but my XP does not seem to have a Backup program.
This past week was interesting but stressful.
Next step is to figure out a plan to replace the hard-drive.
73 Jerry km3k
