having trouble fixing a broken inbox.dbx file.

i'm trying to recover some emails from an inbox.dbx file, but I'm having trouble getting access to the emails.

i've tried the following tools, but none of them can read the file. Mail Navigator 1.9, Advanced Outlook Express Recovery, Advanced Outlook Express Verifier and Advanced Outlook Express Repair.

basically my friend opened his email this morning and all his email was gone (about 20 messages). I manually looked at the file with notepad and the headers and mail are still there, in semi-readable format but I can't get any recovery tools to access it to extract the mails (some of which have important [mostly word] attachments).

has anyone had any luck with recovering mail from OE this way? if so what did you use?

I was originally going to use the Inbox Repair tool, but apparently it only restores PST's, not DBX's according to all the info i can find.

thanks in advance for any help.