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There are a few ways of restoring the Outlook Express icon on your desktop.

After a long process of cleaning up after a virus, my Outlook Express icon is missing from my desktop. All the other icons are there. Would running System Recovery Console again restore the OE icon? If not, what could I do to restore this icon?

Off the top of my head, I can come up with at least three approaches to try.

One, simply right click on the desktop, Select New, Shortcut, and then browse to locate Outlook Express's .exe file. THAT's not obvious, but it's msimn.exe (form Microsoft Internet Mail and News - Outlook Express's old name), and is most likely in C:\program files\outlook express.

Another approach is to run System File Checker, which may well restore it.

Yet another approach would be to reinstall/repair Internet Explorer, of which Outlook Express is a part of it.

My approach would be the fist recreating the link manually.

Article C2263 - January 19, 2005

Leo Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed. After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.

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Recent Comments
12 Comments

I recently launched a very nasty Smitfraud program (not knowing i had)which removed the outlook express logo among many others .Your advice was excellent and i now have my desktop short cut back.

Posted by: Jim at July 26, 2008 2:30 AM

Thanks fo r the procedure above but when i searched for msimn.exe and clicked on it to launch outlook express, i am not getting the message headers but not the content - each mail looks blank - any way to fix this?

Posted by: breffni at September 3, 2008 10:11 AM

With Windows Xp,recently re installed and Outlook Express finally working,all I had to do was drag it from the start menu to the desktop.

Posted by: Steve at October 2, 2008 11:30 AM

hii mr.leo am using windows server 2003 on my pc my computer has been infected with a .exe file when i was using yahoo chat and my desktops icons got changed.. my computer to krishnas computer my documnets to krishna documnets.. and recyle bin name changed to gw bush i removied that file(.exe)frm c drive and windows folder.. how to restore my desktop and even my explorer and yahoo mseger are not working properlyy they get closed very soon, and my if i ping someone on yahoo msgr some auto genrated mesages and that .exe file goes into other yahoo msgr im window please help meeeeeeeee,i couldnt format the system coz i have peoplesoft software in it and am using windows server 2003 as my os

Posted by: raghav at October 26, 2008 1:09 AM

Hi,
i by mistake deleted my msimn.exe file, now im unable to find it, i now go through run and input msmin.exe and then check my mails. is there any solution for this ??

Regards
Srikanth

Posted by: Srikanth at January 2, 2011 8:29 AM
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