Why can't I open attachments in OE6?

OE6 has a new security feature under Tools | Options | Security labeled "Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus. You can turn this off long enough to save an attachment, but it is recommend that you then turn it back on for normal use. For a much more detailed explanation, see OLEXP: Using Virus Protection Features in Outlook Express 6 (Q291387)

The new OE Cumulative Update released by Microsoft recently was designed to correct, among other things, the annoying fact that OE always defaults to My Documents when you save an attachment. Unfortunately the patch itself has a bug that prevents the new fix from working. The user-selected path for attachments is indeed written to the registry, but the final character in the path name is dropped, which means it won't work. Since the path stored at that point is not a valid path, OE dutifully defaults to, you guessed it, My Documents. Microsoft are aware of this problem (and probably more than a little embarrassed by it).

Make sure your settings look like this