Problems with "invisible folders" and creating Mail Profile

I am trying to help a friend sort out some problems on her PC. It is fairly new (6 months old) ASUS running Win7 (64 bit). The opsys came preloaded with the computer. I am very familiar with WinXP and with Office2003. I have a few hours on Win7 just poking around to get a feel for the layout.

The computer came with Office 2010 (trial). When the owner looked at what was available, she could not find Outlook. She contacted the store and was told that Outlook did not come with Office. That is not really ture, but she did not know that so she purchased and installed Outlook2010. MS Office 2003 was subsequently installed (a few weeks later) without ol2003 (ol2010 was already installed). Both ol2010 and mso2003 run OK although the owner finds the very different interfaces a bit of a pain and much prefers the old style interface of mso2003.

Updates (opsys and MS Office) are both set to automatic. There is a history of failed updates. When I checked the log file, they all appear to be MS Office updates. I am guessing that the update process is confused by seeing both Office2003 and ol2010. Is that likely?

I offered to install (activate?) ol2003. I did a little preliminary poking around the web to see what problems I might encounter. It appears that MSOffice2003 should run fine on Win7 including ol2003 but any ol2010 profiles should be deleted and new profiles built for ol2003.

I opened ol2010 and checked the location of the relevant pst file (so I could find it when I installed ol2003 and built the new profile). But when I tried to find it using Windows Explorer (WE), I found that the key directory ( … users/owner/documents) was not visible. I tweaked WE’s View settings to make sure all system, hidden and protected files and folders were visible but the documents directory is still not visible. The file is there because when I searched for a *.pst file on the C: drive, the search showed the file to be exactly where Outlook said it was:
C:/ users/owner/documents/outlook files/xxx.pst
Any idea why users/owner/documents is not visible? I thought this might be a privileges issue. There are only two accounts on the system: owner and guest. Owner has administrator privileges. All work has been done from the owner account..

To familiarize myself with profile creation (just in case it is different than WinXP), I clicked on Mail (32bit) in the Control Panel and got a “lack of necessary resources and memory” error. I doubt that the error message is correct (the sys has 4GB of memory and no other user appls were running), but something is clearly wrong. In searching for similar problems on the web, I found numerous cases where people encountered this problem but the answer was “bad install of Win7”. Any thoughts?

Thanks

outlook is an ok email app i find it is just filled with junk options that most users will never have a need for, when you looked for outlook you wouldn't have found it has it has been renamed to windows live mail.

the pst is not in the location your looking.

c:users/(account name)/appdata(hidden)/microsoft/outlook

your pst file will be located there for either outlook 2003 or 2007 2010.

windows live mail which is free is very similar to outlook in terms of visual and interface now essentially it's outlook express. some minor differences but unless your a buisness full outlook really isn't worth the cost.

where your looking now is where it would be for outlook express...i could be wrong on that bit though.

as to the error you got, i've never seen a mail option in control panel before so i have no idea what you clicked on.

Thanks for the reply. However I do not think you read my original post; see comments below

outlook is an ok email app i find it is just filled with junk options that most users will never have a need for, when you looked for outlook you wouldn't have found it has it has been renamed to windows live mail.
Outlook Express was renamed Windows Live Mail. Outlook is part of the MS Office suite and is still called Outlook. Having used email for almost 30 years and tried at least two dozen different email applications, Outlook is the best email tool I have ever encountered. And, it fully supports VBA so you can develop customizations for those special cases not suported by the native appl.

the pst is not in the location your looking.
Yes it is. I searched for *.pst files and found it precisely where ol2010 said it would be

c:users/(account name)/appdata(hidden)/microsoft/outlook
appldata is called documents in the version of Windows7 on my friends computer. There is no folder called appdata (hidden or not)

your pst file will be located there for either outlook 2003 or 2007 2010.
You are mistaken

windows live mail which is free is very similar to outlook in terms of visual and interface now essentially it's outlook express. some minor differences but unless your a buisness full outlook really isn't worth the cost.
You seem to be hung up on why Outlook is "too much" for most people. that has nothing to do with the nature of the thread.

where your looking now is where it would be for outlook express...i could be wrong on that bit though.
yes, you are wrong.

as to the error you got, i've never seen a mail option in control panel before so i have no idea what you clicked on.
what you see in the Control Panel depends on the version of Win7 you are running and how you have set up folder display options. In its most basic form, there are two control panels, 32 bit and 64 bit. Finding the 32 bit control panel is not as obvious as it should be. The mail profile setup tool is a 32 bit appl and is found either in the 32 bit control panel or on the 64 bit control panel where it is named "Mail Profiles (32 bit)"