"Steve Cochran" wrote in message ...

Go to Start | Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Disk cleanup and run that and see what kind of space you can free up on the hard drive. If you still get the inability to compact the file, then move all the messages to another folder. Then with OE closed, delete the inbox.dbx file. Then you will have a new and very small inbox.

Thanks, Steve. I moved a bunch of files to an external disk and got 2GB of free memory. Also I copied some of the larger DBX files off the primary HD and now can compact folders. The compacting process appears to proceed to completion as normal, but when finished there is no more free disk space, and the compacted DBX files are the same size as the un-compacted files.