Tip for anyone in the same predicament:
With several windows upgrades behind me, now at 10.2, I lost the ease and functionality of Outlook Express several win gens ago. Real shame as it was one of my favorite programs. The current 2013 office email version seems to have upgraded/transformed/mutated into something else and I did not want to purchase an upgrade for Office and buy a subscription just to get outlook back, or join a cloud, or give my email to another mail server, or use win live mail......WT*!?
So I dug into my old files and found a 2003 copy of MS Office with a 2005 update. Sooooo...
I installed the whole 2003 office suit, dug through the files to find OE, and moved it to the desktop. Then, with a few clicks pop3, stmp, port settings, Norton security etc..I was able to install the ooooold version of OE and for the first time in years, see my email with the click of a button on my desktop without having to join a cloud or use windows live mail..... Nice that email is basically prehistoric in code...that was probably the reason I could never get my email net location to work with the newer windows...
You can see from the screenshot the old and new action dates and the file location in 32bit x86 from Win 7!
all is good right now... :)