Thank you all, unfortunately no joy.
IFR, it appears the option you proposed is not available in XP Home. B u m m e r, it looked promising.
BOAC, your method would make OE contents on both computers identical, but would inevitably overwrite info rather than merge it. One
could make the laptop use the OE folder on the desktop 'puter via the network, but that would only work if both were on and the network was up. If the laptop was off roaming somewhere it would have to use its own OE folder and then the emails, address book etc would be out of synch and hence back to the original problem. I might explore your suggestion of leaving messages on the server until both 'puters have them, but it's a bit manual and it wouldn't keep the address books synched - I'm trying to find something automatic and elegant, if you know what I mean. (No offence intended
)
Spanners, the import and export options in tools-accounts only moves the account info, like servers, usernames, passwords, etc, not the folders, messages, etc. And the options under the File menu seem only to work if you are moving data between OE and Outlook
on the same machine. ie OE on my laptop won't export across the network to Outlook on my other machine.
I suppose that's another option, install the full Outlook (I have an oldie, '97) on both machines - it's network ready, but it hogs disk space and resources and I'm trying to minimise the bloat factor, especially on the laptop
and I'm not sure I wouldn't have the same problem anyway. Bit like driving a thumbtack with a sledgehammer, but if one must ... it might be worth a go.
Off to google for third party utilities - if you know of any I'd appreciate some pointers. Thanks again.
AA