Thanks Brian - I'm back up and running again and thanks to your help I'm a happy bunny today. ;-)

I'm a long-term PMail user... with what seems to be a quite unusual crash.I use Mailwasher to check my servers then PMail fired up as usual this morning. I downloaded about 40 emails and the inbox was looking normal, until I tried to click on one email. Then Pegasus minimised to the taskbar and refuses to come back. I've updated HTMLrenderer & BearHTML, rebooted several times, even ran the PMail 4.63 install programme again. Still nothing. The PMail icon is sitting in my taskbar, hovering over the icon shows "42 new messages" - but the programme won't maximise. Normally the hover will show me a little graphic of my inbox but now there's just a little horizontal blue bar with the new message line visible (screen grab below).

Windows Task manager says PMail is running and there are no signs of any other problem.

I'm using Win7Pro 64bit on a 6 month old PC that's otherwise a very happy machine.

It's possible the one of the new messages is malformed and causing the problem.    The way to test is is to close Pegasus Mail then move all .cnm files with the date/time stamp that corresponds with the time of the download out of the mailbox directory.  Restart Pegasus Mail.  If it starts fine then gradually move the .cnm files, a few at a time, back into the mailbox directory until you can identify the one that is causing the problem.  One of zero byte file size could be the culprit as well.  Once you identify it you can open it with a text editor to view it's contents.

Many thanks for the quick reply Brian. I've moved all of the relevant CNM files but PMail still won't maximise. Just to be safe I moved the CNM files with yesterday's date as well but still no luck. I'm sure there will be a corrupt file somewhere in the inbox - and I know there are at least six spam emails there. To make matters worse, I teach photography online so most of the emails will contain student images that I can't access yet and today is the first day of the term. A hover over the system tray icon now shows "New Mail 0 messages".

Any other thoughts? 

Could it be that the main Pegasus Mail window has been reduced in size to what you are seeing?  Can you grab a corner and stretch it?

I understand what you're saying, but I can't get any of Pegasus Mail visible onscreen. When I fire up PMail via a desktop shortcut, it asks for my user name, accepts that and goes through the start up procedure (the little hourglass is visible for a few seconds) but after that it only exists on the taskbar. It can't be pursuaded to maximise for love nor money.

Have you restarted Windows?

Yep - more than once. ;-)

Sorry - I'm just heading out for a hospital appointment (leg in plaster). Back in about 3 hrs.

See if the Pegasus Mail window becomes visible if you right click on the taskbar and select "Cascade windows".

[quote user="bfluet"]See if the Pegasus Mail window becomes visible if you right click on the taskbar and select "Cascade windows".[/quote]

I'm afraid not.

At this stage I'm desperate to get my email working again so I've come up with a plan B. I've just backed up the entire PMail folder (35Gb including subdirectories) to an external drive. Then I plan to uninstall Pegasus and install a fresh copy from scratch. Is there any easy way to preserve my existing mailbox folder structure, user settings, etc? I'm the only user but with 4 seperate email accounts on different servers, so any advice on keeping this as simple as possible would really be appreciated.

If you haven gotten into the reinstall yet try, with Pegasus Mail closed, renaming the pmail.ini, folstate.pm and state.pmj files.  When you start Pegasus it will start up like a new installation.  Don't worry about configuring your POP3 and SMTP hosts just yet, get to the main Pegasus Mail window and see if it is no longer minimized.  If all is well, reconfigure.  A print out of the old pmail.ini file can be helpful for reference.

 If you have already done the reinstall, this guide to filenames and extensions can help in determining which files to copy from the old installation.  http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/pf_pmfiles.html    Be careful not to overwrite any configuration files.

[quote user="bfluet"]

If you haven gotten into the reinstall yet try, with Pegasus Mail closed, renaming the pmail.ini, folstate.pm and state.pmj files.  When you start Pegasus it will start up like a new installation.  Don't worry about configuring your POP3 and SMTP hosts just yet, get to the main Pegasus Mail window and see if it is no longer minimized.[/quote]

I've renamed all three files and Pegasus starts normally as a new installation. My previous folder structure is intact and earlier emails are all present. That's reassurring.

[quote user="bfluet"]A print out of the old pmail.ini file can be helpful for reference.[/quote]

Shall I post that here or send it via PM?

[quote user="DigiDog"]I've renamed all three files and Pegasus starts normally as a new

installation. My previous folder structure is intact and earlier emails

are all present. That's reassurring. [/quote]

That's good news.  Something must have happened during a shutdown of Pegasus Mail that caused one of these files to get corrupted.  All you need to do now is reconfigure Pegasus going through all the screens in Tools > Options.  I believe the settings in Tools > Internet Options should have remained intact but review them as well.

 [quote user="DigiDog"]Shall I post that here or send it via PM? [/quote]

 I meant that a print out of the old PMAIL.INI file would be a useful reference for you in doing the reconfiguration.