Before you go any further - BACK THE FILES UP! Save copies of them somewhere safe - a pen-drive, or something. Then, if you do something desperate, you won't have lost your only copies.
As 25 files were not worth the fee I declined - it was then that I notices that the files (restored from the recycle bin) had changed appearance. They now have a distinctive 'curved lime green arrow pointing downwards'. When I click on any of them it calls up the
www.dbxbackup.com website again.
From your description, this is just a file association, I think. If you right click on the icons, then select 'properties' and 'open with', you can change the program they associate to. You could temporarily switch to 'notepad' for now - it won't open them, but it will ensure that dbxbackup goes away...
If these files are not corrupted, then I guess what you are wanting to do is to get them back into Outlook Express?
Here's what I would do...
1. Find out where all your dbx. files are, by doing a search. By default, Outlook Express stores the dbx in more than one known location. So they could be in a number of places. Look here:
http://www.insideoe.com/files/store.htm
This will give you some idea where to look, but you could just search the whole drive. The search may turn up the files you have recovered as well as some other files with the same names - keep a close eye on the locations to make sure you know what you are looking at. It's a bit complicated because your computer may have created some new files and folders to replace the ones you deleted, and it may have given them the same names as the originals. But the new ones will be smaller (because they are fresh, and empty of data)
The folder the files are in is hidden, so you need to unhide it first. You should also make the extensions visible and click to show system files. If you're not sure how to do that, come back. Try to resist the temptation to delete anything!
Basically, what you need to do is have a look to see what the damage actually is. What do you see in C:\Windows\Application Data\Outlook Express\{GUID} or C:\Documents and Settings\<User>\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express?
What files do you still have? And what sizes are they?
We need to know what you have in the locations suggested
and the details of your backed up/recovered files.
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