> Huh? I've never heard of that before, millions of people worldwide rely on 
> Outlook on their work machines to do far more than email on a day-to-day 
> basis.  There's no way that MS is going to do anything like an automatic 
> "upgrade" to OE unless they wanted to piss off a huge number of corporate 
> customers who give them serious amounts of money.

It happened because of MS Works, the full version of Office
was $400 so I got the lesser $99 "home" package which came
 with Word, Outlook, and Works. When Works updated beyond
minor versions it reinstalled over the old components, and
messed with the Outlook registry without notice. Essentially MS
thinks that anyone lacking the full Office license shouldn't have
Outlook, even if they purchased it separately.
I could have reinstalled to fix it, it just didn't matter much to me.
I did see a forum full of people upset about it, that's just the
way MS treats home customers sometimes.

> Anyway, now OE has been renamed to Windows Live Mail (or maybe something 
> else recently), so there should be less confusion between the free 
> mail/news reader and Outlook.

I haven't used Windows Live Mail, according to Wikipedia it has a number
of differences from Windows Mail. Such as support for web based email
Windows Live Hotmail, (just to keep everyone confused about the names).
And they made sure to remove local help files for poor guys
trying to get back online.

> Also, why would anyone use Outlook for simply reading email?  That seems a 
> bit of an overkill.

Mostly I wanted Word because there's a fair number of Word documents
here that came from elsewhere, but needed to be accessed/edited.
Outlook was just part of the package sale as MS marketed it.

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