Blank e-mails and faulty web buttons

Please help, a friend of mine has a Sony VIOA Laptop running XP Home SP2
which he ask me to look at for him. He says during the weekend he was
clearing out "Unwanted" or "Uneeded" files (uhoh).
Since doing so all the e-mails in his Outlook Express have gone blank. When
i altered the Outlook options to display all mail as plain text the paperclip
attachment button appeared at the top of the message box and i could view the
e-mail text from a text file attachment. But cannot get the text to show in
the message normally and when i tried to create a message it would not let me
type in the message area and all type tools were greyed out.
Also i noticed while trying to figure this out, certain buttons on web pages
faild to work at all. You can click them as much as you like but nothing
happens though others appear to work fine and even the ones that don't work
still change the cursor to a little hand indicating that there is a button. I
tried re-installing the java app but this made no diffrence i think it could
have somthing to to with ActivX or HTML. Any help or ideas much appreciated.
Thanx for your time


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