An email I received from Hilary Tilley titled "RE: Greeting" seems to
be an attempt to plant a virus. Is there a way to opening it to see
what it is without getting infected?

Personally....I would NEVER open ANYTHING that said re: greeting.

I have forwarded suspicious e-mails to a Hotmail account that I keep
for mail such as  you describe. Hotmail does a pretty good job of
scanning e-mails for viruses, and has caught several viruses for me. I
believe Yahoo e-mail does too.

However, I agree with steph53, it DOES sound suspicious, especially if
you don't recognize the sender.

What you should do is disable the preview pane (in Outlook and Outlook
Express) that would bring about the opening of the email
automatically. What you could do is use Thunderbird or an email client
that is not widely used.

Viruses that are especially email-born usually target specific email
clients and use exploits to automatically infect target systems via
vulnerabilities in ActiveX controls or vulnerabilities in the client
themselves.

If you are using a Microsoft email client, I would recommend just
disabling the preview pane and just save the message on your HD
somewhere (.eml usually). Then just open it with Notepad. You'll see
plenty of headers and junk but you will be able to read the message.
Do not under any circumstances double-click on the saved message as it
will open with your default email client which is what you DON'T want.
That should work and allow you to read the contents of the message
without infection.

Thank you very much ,special_k-ga, for your advice, but please excuse
my ignorance for not understanding what"disable the preview pane"
means. I am using bcpl.net (Baltimore Counyy Public Library) and web
mail as my internet provider. Will I have to switch to outlook or
outlook express?
Thanks ahead for any clarification

You won't be able to use Outlook Express, or Outlook on a public
computer. You must used web-based e-mail, as you're using.