1st off - YES, i have used this account every day since Hotmail.Com was made (way before Outlook)
so - after working 3 days - this is what I did! Made 2 other e-mail accounts on different e-mail applications. my old MS account that I could not get into has/had my mobile phone as a contact. so, I went somewhere that asked for a sign in, put in the broken account and clicked "Forgot Password". this sent a security message to my phone, (ok - part 1), then said it was not enough and sent a message to one of the other e-mail accounts, (ok - part 2), and then sometimes wanted to send another code to whatsapp, or another email account somewhere... anyway, after several tries at coordinating all the phones and e-mail accounts - I completed the task and got back into my MS account. Thank you all for looking (and listening)