Repeat crashing corrupt .pst while migrating mail to Exchange account

[OttIT]

I have a user who got a new PC and at the same time, was migrated to Business Essentials. He now only has outlook.com, so here on a spare PC running Outlook 2016, I have connected his O365 Exchange account and opened his .pst file. I was able to drag and drop contacts and a bunch of mail already - current year's Sent and 2018 Sent and 2017 Sent. I moved a year at a time into separate new folders created within the Exchange account. I moved current year's items to Inbox and am now moving 2018 Inbox into a separate folder. I tried the whole year and it crashed; I thought maybe too many messages to deal with at once. I then tried moving only a month at a time. December was okay, Nov crashed.

I am down to doing only a screenful at a time now ~20 messages or so which is about 1/4 of a day's worth of messages.
I thought I had pinpointed a specific message causing the issue - I clicked on one single message in the .pst which I thought could have been spam and it crashed. I then avoided that one and selected a dozen others sure to be legit and it crashed. Next time I could click on that questionable one without issue.

Each time it crashes I mean Outlook closes suddenly and reports a corruption in the pst launching scanpst which has been taking anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours to complete! I have tried dragging, copy, and move.

ANY TIPS ?

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