The Tekblog

You are trying to open an OST that has been orphaned and are getting "ost file was configured for another mailbox".

Just Googling this turns up all kinds of people looking for a solution here. There is a (relatively) simple way of recovering when 2 things are true.

1.) You haven’t removed the user’s local profile that contained an "association" with the Exchange mailbox from which the OST was created. (Usually in c:\Documents and Settings\<username>)
2.) You are utilizing Outlook 2003 or better.

*You will want to create a local user account with which to do this.

So the first thing to understand is that the registry contains a "mapping" (if you will) of local profiles to user accounts. Second thing is that all user accounts, local and otherwise (the latter of which are beyond the scope of this conversation), have a Security Identifier or SID.

Login as ‘Administrator’ Open regedit and navigate to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList". You will note several SIDs; these represent the accounts on your computer. You will note that the service accounts also have a SID. You want to select each of these subkeys and examine the ‘ProfileImagePath’ value. This will "point" to the local copy of each respective user profile. Identify the one that belongs to the account you created above *. Identify the one belonging to the old account with which you had the mailbox previously working (and thusly the OST). Change the value of the account you created to point to the previously working one.

Log off the administrator and login as the user you created. Make sure your OST is properly in place (usually c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings \Application Data \Microsoft \Outlook).

You should now be able to open the OST and then export to PST and easily access your data to do with what you will.

If this seems like a bit much to you maybe you ought to consider hiring a professional (namely me) to do it for you.

=)

Cheers,
-JC-