I decided to try and breath some life into my wife's old  HP ZE4500 laptop for a work hack. It originally had Win XP home on it  but every 6 months or so it would trash it's self.  I installed Win XP pro as an upgrade and all seemed well until last week  when i loaded work related stuff on it and Outlook  kept auto starting.  So I blew XP away and used a slipstream disk that one of our IT guys made.  Same thing, Outlook express auto started with lots of copies.  Check for viri and malware, none.  Found that Outlook Xxpress was being started  via MSM so i disabled that in the registry.   However  when Office 2003 was installed  Outlook restarted.  This was being started in the Internet options> programs > default email client.  If i changed this to say Opera multiple copies of that would start.   Went back to an old version of Win XP Pro  same problem.

 

I suspect tha there is a hardware problem with the electronics  in the Email softkey on the keyboard.  If it wasn't for the fact that i shelled out $110 for a new battery last week i would bin it.

Is my assumption of this problem  correct.  Did some web searches but didn't turn  up anything that was free.  Most solutions wanted you to pay money  for an answer..