MAPI and Thunderbird/Lexmark problem

A client runs Win 2K, scans with a Lexmark X7170, emails with current
Tbird. Until yesterday, he could push the scan button on the scanner
and the image would automatically be sent to Tbird where he would get
a dialog box asking if there were additional scans or not. If not,
the image was nicely attached to an email and off it went.

Yesterday we worked a problem where his Word would hang during
startup. The fix for that involved running a registry cleaner along
with uninstalling and reinstalling Word following a run of "Eraser2K"
to correctly remove traces of word.

Now, when he attempts to scan as before, he gets a dialog box saying
that the default email app does not properly support the Mapi commands
required to automatically do this, and tells him to manually scan,
save, and then attach.

I've looked at settings in the Lexmark app, and it's apparently
properly pointed at Tbird, yet it's not happy any more.
Thinking that somehow yesterday's "cleanup" of the Word issue has now
caused this to occur; guessing next steps may be reinstalls of Lexmark
and Tbird s/w but interested in theories here first. Fixmapi made no
difference.

tx