Outlook express randomly starts :s

[Dihi Doctor]

I am trying to fix a problem for a friend on his laptop - when Windows is running Outlook express will randomly start. As you can imagine, this is rather inconvenient, especially when running a fullscreen game for example.
The time for OE to start varies and is not fixed (hence "random").

Has anyone else experienced this problem or know of a common program that launches an email client. I have removed the usual 'cluttery' apps that run in the background (that I recognised).

Outlook Express version 6, running on Windows XP Home edition (SP2, IIRC)

Thanks

[EvilMunky]

I once had a very similar problem on a machine at the site i supported.
Basically they were getting Microsoft Outlook 2000 starting at seemingly random times.

However, this only happened when connected to the internet.

Ran some decent spyware tools (something like spysweeper) and it picked up abunch of things, one of which was calling outlook.

Worth running decent spyware against the machine, as well as making sure that the AV is up to date.

Also if it is an OE error, then maybe windows update the machine to get hte latest security release of it.

Also i know its dificult - but stuff is rarely random ime, so check log files and maybe event viewer to have a look for anything happening at the same time

[Dihi Doctor]

Thanks. Strange thing is it didn't have any network connections when it was doing this. I noticed up-to-date AV, but signifcantly out-of-date definition files for the spyware scanner (d'oh). Will try updating that next before going into logs etc.

Cheers