E-mails, Mailwasher, Microsoft Outlook & Outlook Express

[#1]

My wife and I have our own pcs, both connected to the internet via a router. I have been dealing with our e-mails, using Mailwasher (Free and more recently Pro) and Outlook Express, with no problems, except I have to get my wife to look at her e-mails on my pc (we have separate e-mail accounts, with either her name or mine in front of the @ as you can on Plusnet, but I have Mailwasher Pro on my pc set to get Outlook Express to pick up both sets of e-mails).
I recently loaded Mailwasher Pro on my wife's pc, and tried to set it up so that Mailwasher gets Outlook Express to collect just my wife's e-mails, and leave mine for my pc to collect later.
Now the problems start. Even though I have set both Mailwasher Pro and Outlook Express on my wife's pc exactly as they are set for her on my pc (except on her pc she is the default account, on my pc default is postmaster), I cannot get Outlook Express on her pc to stay as the default mail processor.
On her pc, Internet Options doesn't include Outlook Express in the list of possible e-mail processors (it does on my pc). Apparently, fixing this is a major edit of the registry (is this true?). The e-mail list on Internet Options does include Microsoft Outlook.
However, there is a way of getting Mailwasher to use Outlook Express to deal with collecting my wife's e-mails. Not that it matters much, because, whether I get Mailwasher to use Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook, neither will actually collect her e-mails, and now if I try to use Outlook Express without using Mailwasher (I use my pc to delete dubious e-mails before I try this on my wife's pc), it now says "there has been an error contact Microsoft 0x80004005" or something like that.
So now I seem to have several problems that are linked to each other.
How do I (1) fix Outlook Express, (2) get Outlook Express to collect my wife's e-mails, and (3) fix the "problem" in Internet Options?
My thanks in advance

[#2]

Well lets do the simple one first to set the default email client download FREE default email client which will let you set it up from
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/defaultmail.htm
So that was simple
I assume you have set up a email box on plus net for your wife and one for yourself as that is the way to do it.
So if you then set outlook/mailwasher to get mail for you wife it would login as penneck+wifesmailbox name so if you created an account on plusnet for her called gerty the login would be
penneck+gerty
That would just get any email addressed to gerty@penneck.plus.com and wouldnt download any other mail of yours.
You account would login as penneck+boss or whatever your mail box is called. If you login as penneck you will get any mail not addressed to gerty or boss.
If you have anti spam set up on plus net you should get very little spam with the new filters so you can ditch mailwasher and let plus net take the strain.

[#3]

Thanks for your reply.
I have solved the Outlook Express thing in Internet Option, so have solved all of the problems except one.
Now all that is left is, it doesn't matter whether I use Mailwasher to get to Outlook Express, or go straight to Outlook Express, OE doesn't collect my wife's e-mails (nor mine if I set up an account in OE for me).
My wife and I are both on Plusnet, with my wife's e-mail account "<wife>@<username>.plus.com", and I am "<me>@<username>.plus.com". I can get OE to pick up both of our e-mails using Mailwasher/OE, if I am on my pc, but can get neither on my wife's pc. The OE accounts appear to be identical on both pcs, that is why it has been so difficult to figure out why they work in one place but not the other. I have checked under all 5 tabs in each account (General, Servers, etc), and the only difference is on my wife's pc, her account is the default, but on my pc the default is postmaster.
If you can think of something I might have missed, or something I just don't know about, I'd be grateful to hear about it.
Thanks again
Graham
[Moderator's note by Peter (PJ): Removed e-mail addresses to help prevent spam as this is a public forum]

[#4]

unless you are happy i would hide your e-mail address
I do the same with my wife, works ok for her,  username+forename

[#5]

so on the wifes pc in outlook it should be set to penneck+wife and nothing else it should be the only account to make things simpler and of coarse use her password.
If its setup like this then what error messages do you get?

[#6]

I didn't get any error messages. OE just didn't collect the e-mails from plusnet.
However, I have, not 5 minutes ago, solved the last of these problems. In Outlook Express, there is a box that needed ticking for sending and receiving e-mails at startup. I had thought that 'startup' meant when the pc started up (numbskull that I am), but I ticked the box, and now OE collects the e-mails as required.
Many thanks to everyone for all your help, especially to Pierre_Pierre who pointed out my error in announcing our e-mail addresses, and even more especially to Peter who edited out my stupidity (at least, the e-mail addresses part of my stupidity - there's no cure for the rest of it).
Regards

[#7]

I might be wrong,  but I am not sure if download at start up will actually then download any further e-mails if you leave OE open, personally, I just click on the send and receive button at the top