[Albert Lionheart]

It had not occurred to me that my client was a Dr Who wannabee but when he called me for help I must admit to not having the first idea what was going on. The problem was that outgoing mail was sent OK but then vanished and was not to be found in any of the mail folders. Windows Live Mail appeared to be working properly as did everything else, except links from emails into the browser which was set to default to FireFox which popped up an error message but showed the contents of the URL anyway.
I started down the road of checking the anti-virus and system security and found 3 different AV programs running, one of which was AVG which had not worked properly for some time judging by the date of the last downloaded update. I cleared out all the rubbish and snake oil stuff and restarted the thing - no improvement. I sent a couple of emails to a hotmail account and they worked fine both ways - except there was no record of Live Mail ever having sent them. As a last ditch solution I was about to backup all the mail folders, accounts and contacts before removing and reinstalling the latest edition of Live Mail when I noted the clock was a few minutes out - about 5 minutes fast. As a habit I like to have the time and date right before installing software for obvious reasons so I reset the clock. The client had come back at this time and noticed what I was doing and that I had missed that the date was exactly a month out - a month slow. Doh! Reset it all and everything works and looking for outgoing mails with a send date a month old revealed them all present. It didn't fix the problem with URLs embedded in emails but I got this working with IE so I reset the default browser. Morale - sometimes the smallest things.....