Outlook Express hangs when you press Send/Receive

["Mortimer" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A customer with IE7 and the corresponding version of Outlook Express is 
reporting that OE will open OK and display the contents of all his folders 
but it hangs when he presses Send/Receive, instead of bringing up the second 
window with the status and error messages as it tries to contact the POP and 
SMTP servers.

I suggested that he moves the contents of each folder in turn to a temporary 
folder, compact the original folder and then move the contents back again, 
because I have seen a situation with another customer when the folders had 
got corrupted and this process sorted things out.

But that hasn't helped on this occasion.

Has anyone seen this symptom? Is there a way of uninstalling and then 
reinstalling IE and OE, in case the problem is caused by corruption of a DLL 
or EXE?

Is it worth saving the dbx files and then deleting them to force OE to 
regenerate blank ones, and starting afresh?

The customer did say that he'd had a warning from a friend that this friend 
had become infected and may have been sending out infected emails, but a 
scan with AVG 8 and Spybot 1.5 has not found anything on the customer's PC.