Outlook Express "to free up disk space, outlook express can compact messages" issue

A few weeks ago on my Windows XP machine Windows started popping up a message from Outlook Express saying "to free up disk space, outlook express can compact messages." At first I was worried about a virus or spyware, but after a little investigation I learned that the problem was much more mundane and easy to solve. What happened was that Microsoft tweaked the way their desktop search application indexes emails and it was now launching Outlook Express every time I booted my computer. Since I don't use Outlook Express, I "simply" told Microsoft to stop indexing Outlook Express, but it turns out this process took a number of steps.

If you use both Microsoft Outlook and Windows Search, these instructions will disable your ability to search through your emails using the taskbar search functionality. For the vast majority of users, however, the following steps will solve the problem without any ill effects:

Instructions

Open up the Control Panel in Windows XP (switch to "Classic View" if your screen doesn't match the image below.)



Open up the Indexing Options from the control panel.



Now click on the Modify button.
Note to advanced users: If you have any old Outlook identities, even ones you haven't used in a long time, you'll have to hit "cancel" a number of times to get through this part as Windows Search will attempt to open each of them to see if there's anything it can index. For me that was a total of 14 Cancel clicks.


You'll now see a list of your computer's resources, with checkboxes next to the items being indexed. Uncheck the box next to Microsoft Outlook Express, click "OK" and then "Close" and you're done.