Wow - Midnight! Unfortunately a problem-free update is the exception with these things. I find that although it is more of a pain and takes longer, a clean format/build is usually the best way to go.
I'm surprised that Win2k did not have the required drivers for your ethernet card. At the very least Dell should have them available on their download site. Punch in the service tag, select Win2K as the OS, and look for the network drivers section. If on the slim chance that Dell does not have them, you may be able to get them from the card vendor's web site.
Fortunately you have 2 computers and can use the other for internet access to get these drivers. I had a friend who recently drove down to Ohio to upgrade his mom's laptop with Win2k. Same problem - the correct network driver could not be found/installed, so he was SOL as far as getting correct drivers from the internet. He finally went out and bought a new $20 ethernet PC Card from the local Best Buy instead.
As far as Outlook Express, I suspect that something happened when you were copying the files to the folder for the CD burner. The action should have just copied them, leaving them intact in the original Store folder. When you told me that after canceling the copy operation, and then trying to open Outlook Express, it was empty, that did not seem right. Those files should have still been there. I didn't realize that Outlook Express (OE) was still open when you started copying files; OE may have had a lock on the open files which would have prevented them from being copied completely.
Either way I bet that we can get the files back in place so that OE will be able to find and open them. OE has the ability to maintain different "identities" so that multiple users on a single computer can have their own distinct mailboxes. OE stores each set of distinct mailbox files under a certain path, and that path ususally ends with a crazy folder name like {AG4G99OIUYR76DHR6E42LO98J}. This uniquely identifies each identity. I'm assuming that you only had 1 identity setup through OE, but it's common for a few blank/unused identies to be set up as well. The goal is to find the main identity folder that OE was using to store all of your mailbox files.
If you open up OE on the rebuilt system, select the Tools menu, then Options, and then the Maintenance tab. Click on the Store Folder button. This tells OE where to look for all of the mailbox files. Use Windows Explorer to then navigate to this same path. What's in this folder? There should be a bunch of *.DBX files, one for each folder you had setup in OE (Inbox, Sent Items, Outbox, etc.). Since you seemed to have a ton of saved e-mails, these files should be quite large. If you had any special folders setup, i.e. "DRN", then you would see a DRN.DBX file.
So we have to then do 1 of 2 things: 1) Get all of your old/existing OE mailbox files into the path that OE is expecting them to be in, or 2) Change the Store Folder location that OE is currently using to point to the actual location of your mailbox files.
With either of these it is important that all of the mailbox files are together as a set. If you had a folder you created called "Jokes", and that mailbox file could not be found, you'd still be OK. You just would not have the folder anymore when opening OE. There are a few key mailbox files however, like Folders.DBX. OE may very well report back a corruption if certail key mailbox files are missing or only partially there.
All of this may be easier to help you with over the phone. We just have to do a little detective work. Let me know how I can help.
- Bill