Thank you for the reply.

I eventually realized i was in express and this meant incompatibility for pst so I ended up exporting the email accounts to outlook(which I apparently also had but wasn't aware of, not a computer I use regularly) then exported the pst.

I also found that when importing the pst files to outlook 2007 the pst files would lose data. I ended up just opening the pst file (File>open data file or something like that) then copying the data into the folders already there.

Round about way to fix but I guess problem solved.