AKICIF: Entourage on Macintosh Help

Of course my e-mail would suddenly go wonky just as I'm about to run off to World Fantasy, wouldn't it? (That's just par for the course for me this year.)

If there's anyone out there who knows about Entourage on a Mac, here's the problem as I'm describing it to the Microsoft help line:

When I tried to launch Entourage this evening, I got an error message saying "Entourage cannot access your data. To attempt to fix the problem, rebuild your database."

When I try to rebuild the database (I've tried several times), I get the message "An error occurred while attempting to rebuild your database. An unknown error (-5000) occurred." The same message appears if I try to verify database integrity.

How do I get Entourage back -- preferably with my old database, but how can I get it working at all?

I'm running an iMac -- 1.25 Ghz G4, 256 megs of memory, system 10.2.8. There's almost 23 gigs free on the hard drive.

Any thoughts, suggestions, brilliant ideas? (I won't be able to implement any of them after about 10 AM tomorrow until late Sunday night -- since I'll be at WFC -- so that might give any knowledgeable folks more time to mull it over.) Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Update: I may have become too cynical; Microsoft's help line (though I had to jump through hoops to get through to them) was quick and correct. The problem has been solved.

So this is Emily Litella saying "Never mind."