Something screwy is going with OE after installing XP SP3 with some
people. Most people don't seem to be affected but a few are.

I use a Visual Basic program to insert emails into Outlook Express using
DoCmd.SendObject and every time that command is executed, OE *now* ups the
compaction count, rendering this feature a pain as after 100 emails, it wants
to compact the registry. I send out about 500 emails a day using VB, and now
sit on the ESC key for 400 emails. After reading threads here it's clear that
MS is not going to do anything about it, so I guess it's time to get dump
SP3.

It would be helpful if MS just LEFT this program alone. If they ARE going to
have a programmer make changes, then rewrite this application to use a proper
database that doesn't require this nonsense of compaction. Compaction was
done in the 1970's because few programmers then knew how to structure
databases that did not require compaction, but in the 1980's most learnt how
to do that. That was 25 years ago